A Piece of My Heart was published by Harper & Row in 1976. Ford was thirty-two and had spent years in Mississippi (his home state) absorbing the Southern literary tradition. The novel alternates between two men: Robard Hewes, a working-class Mississippian driving south to reconnect with a former lover who now lives on an island in the river, and Sam Newel, a Chicago law student escaping to the same island to think and write.
The novel is overtly Southern — the Mississippi landscape, the racial tensions, the violence that seems to inhere in the land itself — and its influences (Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty) are visible. Ford has not yet found his distinctive voice (the Midwestern restraint of the Bascombe novels is absent; instead there is Southern lyricism and Gothic intensity), but his gifts for rendering male consciousness and for making landscape express emotion are already present.
The island setting creates claustrophobia: both men are trapped (by desire, by obligation, by the river itself) and the narrative drives toward violence with the inevitability that characterizes Southern fiction. The novel was respectfully reviewed but not widely read — it would take a decade and a change of setting (from Mississippi to Montana and New Jersey) for Ford to find his audience.
Collecting A Piece of My Heart
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1976): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Ford’s first novel.
A Southern Debut
A Piece of My Heart (1976) was Ford’s first novel, published by Harper & Row when he was thirty-two. Set on a small island in the Mississippi River, the novel interweaves two narratives: a man returning to an old love affair in Arkansas, and a law student from Chicago drawn to the island for duck hunting. The novel’s Faulknerian ambitions — dense Southern landscape, violence, racial tension — are unmistakable, though Ford would later move decisively away from this mode. The book sold poorly on publication, making first editions genuinely scarce.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Ford a Southern writer? Born in Jackson, Mississippi, Ford is often grouped with Southern writers, but he has resisted the label. His major work — the Bascombe novels — is set in New Jersey, and he has lived in many states. A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck are his most conventionally “Southern” works.