Rock Springs was published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987. The ten stories are set primarily in Montana and the rural West — a landscape of ranches, trailer parks, small towns, and long highways. Ford’s characters are working-class and lower-middle-class: a man stealing a car to start a new life with his girlfriend and daughter, a couple whose marriage disintegrates during hunting season, a boy watching his father’s affair destroy his family.
Ford writes about these people without condescension or sentimentality: they are intelligent, articulate (in Ford’s distinctive way — they think clearly even when they cannot speak clearly), and aware of their situations. They are not victims of economic forces or social structures but people making choices — often bad ones — in circumstances that offer few good options. The title story follows a man driving a stolen Mercedes through Wyoming with his daughter and his girlfriend, knowing that everything is about to fall apart but unable to stop.
The collection established Ford as one of the finest short story writers of his generation — mentioned alongside Carver (an obvious influence), Cheever, and Munro. His Montana (he lived there for years) is neither the mythic West of cowboy fiction nor the nature-writing West of environmental literature but a contemporary landscape of economic struggle, broken families, and landscapes beautiful enough to mock the people living in them.
Collecting Rock Springs
First edition (Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1987): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $50–$125
- Very good: $20–$50
- Signed: $75–$200
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Ford’s best short fiction.
Montana Stories
Rock Springs (1987) is Ford’s first story collection and contains some of the finest American short fiction of the 1980s. The ten stories are set in Montana and the American West, populated by men on the margins — drifters, petty criminals, men whose lives have gone wrong in ways they can barely articulate. The title story, “Rock Springs,” follows a man driving a stolen car across Wyoming with his daughter and girlfriend; “Great Falls” is a devastating portrait of a marriage’s collapse witnessed through a boy’s eyes. Ford’s prose is spare and emotionally precise, often compared to Raymond Carver’s but warmer and more expansive.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does this compare to Ford’s novels? Many critics consider Rock Springs Ford’s single finest achievement — the stories have a concentrated power that even the Bascombe novels don’t quite match. The Atlantic Monthly Press first edition is the collecting target.