Richard Ford Biography
Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944, the only child of a traveling salesman for a starch company, and was raised in Mississippi and in Arkansas. He went to college at Michigan State University, where he met Kristina Hensley, to whom he has been married since 1968. Ford attended law school very briefly before entering the University of California at Irvine, where he received his M.F.A. in writing in 1970.
After publishing two novels, A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), Ford took a job writing for Inside Sports Magazine. When the magazine was sold, he decided to write a book about a sportswriter; the resulting novel, published in 1986, received widespread acclaim: it was named one of five best books of 1986 by Time magazine. The Sportswriter was followed by Rock Springs (1987), a highly praised book of short stories, and in 1990 by a novel set in Great Falls, Montana, called Wildlife. His previous novel, Independence Day, won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, the first novel ever to win both awards. In 2012 he published Canada, his first stand-alone novel since Wildlife.
In addition to his steady production of fiction, Ford has also taught writing and literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, at Princeton University, and at Williams College.
Ford lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his wife, Kristina, is the head of the city planning commission. He travels frequently and also spends time on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta and at his cabin in Chinook, Montana.
Bibliography
Frank Bascombe Series
1. The Sportswriter (1986)
2. Independence Day (1995)
3. The Lay of the Land (2006)
Novels
A Piece of My Heart (1976)
The Ultimate Good Luck (1981)
Wildlife (1990)
Canada (2012)
Collections
Rock Springs (1987)
Women with Men (1997)
A Multitude of Sins (2001)
Vintage Ford (2004)
Nonfiction
My Mother in Memory (1988)
Above bibliography does not includes contributions to story collections or anthologies edited by Ford.
This biography was last updated on 05/21/2012.
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