FORD, Richard

Nationality: American. Born: Jackson, Mississippi, 16 February 1944. Education: Public schools in Jackson, 1950-62; Michigan State University, East Lansing, 1962-66, B.A. 1966; Washington University Law School, St. Louis, 1966-67; University of California, Irvine, 1968-70, M.F.A. 1970. Family: Married Kristina Hensley in 1968. Career: Assistant professor, University of Michigan, 1975-76; assistant professor of English, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1978-79; lecturer and George Perkins fellow in the Humanities, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1980-81; lecturer, Harvard University, 1994; visiting professor, Northwestern University, 1997-98. Lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Awards: Fellow, Society of Fellows, University of Michigan, 1971-74; Great Lakes College Association Best First Novel award, 1976; Guggenheim fellowship, 1977; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1979, 1986; Pushcart prize story, 1986; Best American Short Stories prize story, 1986; Mississippi Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, 1987; PEN-Faulkner Award for Fiction (citation), 1987; Northwest Booksellers Award for Fiction, 1988; New York Public Library literary lion award, 1989; American Academy award, 1989; Echoing Green Foundation award, 1991; Avery Hopwood Memorial Lecturer, University of Michigan, 1992; Governor's Award for Artistic Achievement (Mississippi), 1993; Fulbright Fellowship (Sweden), 1993; The Lyndhurst prize, 1993; The Rea Award for the Short Story, 1995; Officier, L'Ordre Des Arts et Des Lettres, Republic of France, 1996; Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1996; Finalist, National Book Critics Circle award, 1996; PEN-Faulkner Award for Fiction, 1996; Humanist of the Year, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 1997; Award for Merit in the Novel, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1997. Honorary degrees: University of Rennes, France, 1995; Loyola University, 1996; University of Michigan, 1998. Member: American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1998.

Publications

Short Stories

Rock Springs. 1987.

Women with Men. 1997.

Uncollected Short Stories

"Shooting the Rest Area" (in Paris Review #62). n.d.

"The Newel Vignettes" (in Michigan Quarterly). 1976.

"In Desert Waters" (in Esquire). August 1976.

"Snowman" (in Tri-Quarterly). Spring 1981.

"Middlewest" (in Antaeus). Autumn 1994.

"The Shore" (in Granta). Spring 1995.

"Privacy" (in The New Yorker). 22 July 1996.

Novels

A Piece of My Heart. 1976.

The Ultimate Good Luck. 1981.

The Sportswriter. 1986.

Wildlife. 1990.

Independence Day. 1995.

Play

American Tropical (produced in Louisville) . 1983.

Screenplay:

Bright Angel, 1991.

Other

Editor, with Shannon Ravenel, The Best American Short Stories 1990. 1990.

Editor, The Granta Book of the American Short Story. 1992.

Editor, Ploutghshares. Fall 1996.

Editor, with Constance Sullivan, The Fights. 1996

Editor, with Michael Kreyling, Eudora Welty: Collected Writings. n.d.

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Manuscript Collection:

Michigan State University, East Lansing.

Critical Studies:

"Richard Ford" by Frank W. Shelton, in Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph Flora, 1993; "Frank Bascombe Awakes to Lessons of Independence" by Merle Rubin, in The Christian Science Monitor, July 1995, p.19; "The Poetry of Real Estaste" by Raymond A. Schroth, in Commonweal, October 1995, pp. 27-8.

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Richard Ford is best known for his two novels about Frank Bascombe, The Sportswriter (1986) and its Pulitzer Prize-winning sequel, Independence Day (1995). Both have been called "masterful works" that will ensure Ford's place as a great American writer. Admirers of the short story, however, will best remember Ford as the author of Rock Springs (1987), a collection that has guaranteed him a place in both general and textbook anthologies, especially with the stories "Rock Springs," "Communist," and "Great Falls"—stories that focus on adolescent boys trying to find someone on whom to model their lives and displaced men unable to establish a sense of identity or stability.

In his second collection of three long stories, Women with Men (1997), Ford is still concerned with the painful initiation of adolescent males and the dilemma of lost and drifting men, but the later fiction does not have the tight metaphoric technique of his best early stories. In two pieces that focus on American men in Paris—"The Womanizer" and "Occidentals"—the central characters are unsympathetic and humorless men who drift passively through relationships, affecting others only negatively. In "Jealous" Ford seems much more comfortable focusing on a young man in Montana, a country he obviously knows well, than on middle-aged men adrift in Paris, a city he seems to know only as the prototypical European site of American dreams and disillusionment.

In his best-known story, "Rock Springs," Ford creates a painful portrait of Earl Middleton, a man who drifts through life longing for stability but who is never quite sure how to achieve it. The final image of the story—when Earl wanders about late at night in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn near Rock Springs, Wyoming, looking into car windows at things he says he would have in his car if he had a car—establishes a painful, unforgettable picture of American transience.

"Great Falls" begins with the ominous lines: "This is not a happy story. I warn you." The story is told by a young man who recounts watching his father put the barrel of a revolver under the chin of a man he has caught in bed with his wife. The narrator remembers the befuddled sense of helplessness his father felt, telling the man that he would like to hurt him in some way but not knowing how. The boy perceives that his father "seemed to be becoming someone else at that moment, someone I didn't know." When the boy meets his mother the next day, knowing that his father will never let her come back, he realizes that his life has turned suddenly, and he is left with puzzling questions to which he has never found the answers. The story ends with the narrator pondering the idea that perhaps it is just "some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road—watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire."

"Optimists," a similar story about a young man trying to come to terms with the relationship between his parents, also begins ominously, with the narrator describing a year when life changed for him and his family, the year when he was 15, when his parents divorced, when his father killed a man and went to prison for it, and when he lied about his age to join the army. The story focuses on the father accidentally killing a man for accusing him of failing to help someone who was dying of an injury. The boy knows that the event will change everything: "I began to date my real life from that moment and that thought. It is only this: that situations have possibilities in them, and we have only to be present to be involved." Ford often puts an attempt at thematic significance into the mouths of his characters, even when the realization is more sophisticated and more smoothly articulated than the character seems capable of. At the end of "Optimists" the narrator, who seems to be telling the story 15 years later when he is working as a laborer, sums up the story as follows: "The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all that's happened and by all that could and will happen next."

Although "Empire" focuses on a train trip by a man named Sims and his wife Marge, it also includes a flashback to an incident that occurred the year before, when Marge was in the hospital and Sims slept with a woman named Cleo who had been hanging out with a motorcycle gang called Satan's Diplomats. The title of the story derives from the gang's conviction that they are part of Satan's "evil empire." After Marge gets out of the hospital, Sims gets telephone calls from a man who says that the devil needs Marge and that they are going to kill her since Sims has given up his right to her by having sex with someone else. Sims dismisses the threat, and in the typical Ford explanatory voice the narrator expresses the dismissal in a sophisticated way: "Things you do pass away and are gone, and you need only to outlive them for your life to be better, steadily better. This is what you can count on." The things Sims does do not pass away, however, for on the train trip he goes to bed with another woman while his wife sleeps in her berth. When he goes to the washroom before returning to Marge, he looks in the mirror and thinks, "a deceiver's face … an adulterer's face, a face to turn away from. He smiled at himself and then couldn't look." Another key motif in many of Ford's stories—being on the edge of a new life—is expressed by Marge when he climbs into the berth with her, "We're out on a frontier here, aren't we sweetheart?" Although he does not feel guilty, Sims senses his isolation, "alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around, as if stars held the only light."

As in several of Ford's stories, "Communist" focuses on a young man who does not fully understand an event that occurs to him. The 16-year-old boy who narrates the story is trying to create a relationship with Glen, the man his mother is dating after the death of his father. The central scene is a goose hunt on which Glen takes the boy and during which the two kill dozens of geese. When Glen refuses to go out and get a wounded goose on the lake and the boy's mother tells him that he has no heart, he shoots the goose four times. The narrator, who relates the incident when he is 41, says that he thinks Glen was the first man he ever saw scared and that he felt sorry for him as if he were already a dead man, "Glen Baxter, I think now, was not a bad man, only a man scared of something he'd never seen before—something soft in himself—his life going a way he didn't like."

"Jealous," the coming-of-age story in Ford's collection Women with Men, takes place on the day before Thanksgiving in 1975 when a 17-year-old boy who has been living with his father in a rural area in Montana is going to Seattle to visit his mother. His mother's sister, Aunt Doris, a sexy free spirit, accompanies him. The plot focuses on their misadventures in the town of Shelby while waiting for the train. Doris meets a man in a bar whom the sheriff and deputies come looking for on suspicion of murdering his wife. The man is killed in a shoot-out in the bar; after Doris and the boy are questioned, they board the train for Seattle. Although Ford does not make it clear what effect the killing of the man in the bar has had on the boy, the story ends with him sitting on the train, feeling calm for the first time in his life.

The adolescent boys who face identity crises in many of Ford's short stories become the middle-aged men who can never quite find a home in many others. As adolescents Ford's male characters seem at the mercy of the adults around them, but even though they seem to learn something from the pain this causes them, the adult men they become somehow cannot accept responsibility and grow up. The result is a gallery of males in Ford's stories who are never able to be at home with either themselves or others.

—Charles E. May

See the essay on "Rock Springs."