Richard Ford

At 80 years old, Richard Ford physical status not available right now. We will update Richard Ford's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Early career

During 1976, Ford released A Piece of My Heart, the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in the Mississippi River, and later with The Ultimate Good Luck during 1981. He taught at Williams College and Princeton University for a short time during the interim. Despite good reviews, the books were not selling well, and Ford transitioned from fiction writing to becoming a writer for the New York magazine Inside Sports. "I realized" Ford said, "there was probably a huge difference between what I could do and what would be a success with readers." I felt I had a chance to write two books, but neither of them had much success, so perhaps I should find real jobs and get my paycheck."

The magazine was decommissioned in 1982, and when Sports Illustrated did not recruit Ford, he rediscovered writing fiction, writing The Sportswriter, a book about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who suffers from an emotional crisis following his son's death. The book was published in Ford's first well-known magazine in 1986, named one of Time magazine's top books of 1986 and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Ford introduced Rock Springs (1987), a story collection mainly set in Montana, and it included some of his most popular tales. The novels in Rock Springs were described as "dirty realism" by reviewers and literary commentators. This term was used to describe a group of writers from the 1970s and 1980s, which included Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, two authors with whom Ford was well acquainted — as well as Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Larry Brown, and Jayne Anne Phillips. Those using the word refer to Carver's lower-middle-class characters or the protagonists depicted in Rock Springs by Ford. However, several of the protagonists of Frank Bascombe's books (The Sportswriter, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank With You) have degrees of material affluence and cultural capital that are not traditionally associated with dirty realism.

Mid-career and acclaim

Wildlife, a tale about a Montana golf professional turned firefighter, received mixed reviews and middling sales by the 1990s, but by the time, Ford was well-known. After being a writer and contributor to several projects, he was increasingly sought after. The 1990 Best American Short Stories, the 1992 Granta Book of the American Short Story, the fall 1996 "fiction issue" of Ploughshares, and the 1998 Granta Book of the American Long Story were edited by Ford. Ford said in the latter volume's "Introduction" that he preferred the term "long story" rather than the term "novella." Ford created a two-volume collection of the selected works of Mississippi writer Eudora Welty, which was released in 1998.

During 1995, Ford released Independence Day, a sequel to The Sportswriter, with the continued tale of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe. Both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction were encouraging, and the novel became the first to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ford was crowned the Rea Award for the Short Story the previous year for outstanding achievement in that field. Women With Men, a well-received collection of short stories, was released in 1997. He was described as a "master" of the short story genre by the Paris Review.

Source

Awards and honors

• 1995 Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre
• 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award, for Independence Day
• 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for Independence Day
• 2001 PEN/Malamud Award, for excellence in short fiction
• 2005 St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates
• 2008 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement
• 2013 Prix Femina étranger, for Canada
• 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, for Canada
• 2015 Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival
• 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, finalist, for Let Me Be Frank with You
• 2016 Princess of Asturias Award in Literature
• 2018 Park Kyong-ni Prize
• 2018 Siegfried Lenz Prize
• 2019 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction