Richard Ford

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Ford (2013)

Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944 in Jackson , Mississippi ) is an American writer. He was best known for his novels about the sports reporter and later real estate agent Frank Bascombe: The Sports Reporter , Independence Day , The Situation of the Country and Frank . For Independence Day , he was the only author to date to receive both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN / Faulkner Award .

Life

Richard Ford was born in Jackson , Mississippi , the only son of the traveling salesman Parker Carrol Ford and his wife Edna Akin . After his father had a heart attack, the family moved to Little Rock , Arkansas , in 1952 , where his grandfather ran the Marion Hotel . A few days after Richard's 16th birthday, his father died of a second heart attack in 1960. In 1962, Ford enrolled at Michigan State University to study hotel management, but switched his major to English on an impulse. Despite, or perhaps because of, a slight reading disability , Ford was interested in literature: “As a slow reader, books opened up to me on a very low level - word for word. That doesn't seem bad preparation to me when writers essentially live in sentences. "

Richard Ford (2013)

In 1966 Ford graduated with a BA . He tried unsuccessfully to employment in various occupations, including in the Arkansas State Police, taught at the Junior High School in Flint , Michigan , and undertook the Corps Reserve Officer Training of the US Marines , but was due to a hepatitis disease infection than rejected unfit. Ford began a law degree at Washington University in St. Louis , which he dropped out after a semester, and applied unsuccessfully as a sports reporter for the Arkansas Gazette . In 1968 he married Kristina Hensley, his friend from college, and for lack of a better alternative, decided to pursue a career as a writer. He enrolled at the University of California, Irvine , where he studied at Oakley Hall and EL Doctorow . In 1970 he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) .

In 1976 Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart , which was nominated for the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel . Although the novel was set in Arkansas and Mississippi , the author refused to be pigeonholed as a “ southern writer ” and “neo- faulkner ”: “I always wanted my books to exist outside of so-called southern literature. […] But then people didn't write anything other than that it was another southern novel, and I said, okay, that's it. No more southern literature from me ”. His next novel, The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), was not only about a different area, but also, like Mexico , a different country. It also received good reviews, but like the debut, only sold moderately. Looking back, Ford commented, “I realized that there was a huge gap between what I could do and what would work with readers. [...] I had the chance to write two novels and neither of them had caused much excitement, so maybe I should find a real job and make a living. "

Ford became a sports reporter for Inside Sports in 1981 , until the magazine was discontinued the following year. He then applied to Sports Illustrated to no avail . It wasn't until his prospects as a sports reporter were battered that Ford turned back to literature and wrote a novel about a sports reporter and former writer in which he first introduced his longtime protagonist, Frank Bascombe. The 1986 novel The Sportswriter became the breakthrough that Ford had hoped for and reached the final of the PEN / Faulkner Award . The following year he followed up with the Rock Springs short story collection , which cemented his reputation as one of the best writers of his generation. Ford's short stories are partly placed in the tradition of dirty realism around his friend Raymond Carver . However, Ford rejects such classifications as well as the idea of ​​a joint movement.

Richard Ford (2014)

After his fourth novel Wildlife (1990), which was critically acclaimed, Ford spent three years writing the 1996 sequel to The Sportswriter : Independence Day received rave reviews and won two of the most important American literary prizes in one year, the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN / Faulkner Award . Neither before nor after had any other novel succeeded. Every ten years or so, Ford continued the life story of Frank Bascombe with The Lay of the Land (2006) and Let Me Be Frank with You (2014). In between there was Canada (2012), an award-winning novel in which a first-person narrator looks back on fateful events in his youth.

The Bascombe novels are set in the fictional town of Haddam in New Jersey because Ford himself lived in Princeton in 1982 . According to Charles McGrath, Haddam is a fictional compound from Princeton, Hopewell and Pennington . In 1989 Ford and his wife Kristina moved to Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans , where Kristina served as the executive director of the city planning committee. They also owned a house in Chinook , Montana , and a leased plantation in Mississippi. In 1999, Ford moved alone to East Boothbay on the Maine coast until his wife was released from New Orleans three and a half years later and succeeded him. The couple have no children.

Richard Ford says he needs “a quiet life” when he writes. He can't imagine working in the big city of New York like this . His wife, to whom all of his books are dedicated, is always his first reader. Ford writes all the books by hand and then types them into a word processor, because that's how he stays close to the book: “My biggest challenge is to stay in a book as long as possible because I think I can do a little better can do if I focus on it and stick with it. Young writers like myself often worry about finishing a book. […] My challenge these days is rather the desire to stay in the book without finishing it. In the end I'll finish it or there won't be a book. "

Awards

Memberships

Works

Novels

stories

  • Rock Springs (1987)
    • Rock Springs: Short Stories, German by Harald Goland; S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989. ISBN 3-10-021122-7 .
  • The Womanizer (1992 / in GRANTA 40)
  • Women with Men: Three Stories (1997 - contains The Womanizer / Jealous / Occidentals )
  • A Multitude of Sins (2002)
    • A multitude of sins, German by Frank Heibert; Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 2002. ISBN 3-8270-0064-5 .
  • Vintage Ford (2004)

memories

  • Between Them: Remembering My Parents (2017)

Scripts

  • Bright Angel (1990, directed by Michael Fields - German An Unhimmlische Mission)

As editor

  • The Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992)
  • The Granta Book of the American Long Story (1999)
  • The Essential Tales of Chekhov (1999)
  • The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (2007)
  • Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work (2011)

Web links

Commons : Richard Ford  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Elinor Ann Walker: Richard Ford . Twayne, New York 2000, ISBN 0-8057-1679-3 , p. Xi.
  2. ^ Huey Guagliardo: Perspectives on Richard Ford . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2000, ISBN 978-1-57806-234-8 , p. Xix.
  3. ^ "Being a slow reader admitted me to books at a very basic level - word by word. That doesn't seem like bad preparation to me, if writers are people who essentially live in sentences. ”Quoted from: Don Lee: About Richard Ford: A Profile . In: Plowshares , Issue 70, Fall 1996.
  4. ↑ Huey Guagliardo (Ed.): Conversations with Richard Ford , University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2001, ISBN 1-57806-406-6 .
  5. ^ A b c d Don Lee: About Richard Ford: A Profile . In: Plowshares , Issue 70, Fall 1996.
  6. ^ "I always wanted my books to exist outside the limits of so-called Southern writing. […] But then the people who wrote about it all said it was another Southern novel, and I just said, Okay, that's it. No more Southern writing for me. ”Quoted from: Don Lee: About Richard Ford: A Profile . In: Plowshares , Issue 70, Fall 1996.
  7. ^ "I realized there was probably a wide gulf between what I could do and what would succeed with readers. I felt that I'd had a chance to write two novels, and neither of them had really created much stir, so maybe I should find real employment, and earn my keep. ”Quotation from: Don Lee: About Richard Ford: A Profile . In: Plowshares , Issue 70, Fall 1996.
  8. ↑ See article Inside Sports in the English language Wikipedia .
  9. ↑ See article Dirty realism in the English language Wikipedia .
  10. ↑ Tim Adams: Interview: Richard Ford . In: Granta 99, Autumn 2007.
  11. ^ Bonnie Lyons: Richard Ford, The Art of Fiction No. 147 . In: The Paris Review No. 140, case 1996.
  12. ↑ 1996 Pulitzer Prizes at the Pulitzer Prize .
  13. ↑ Past Winners & Finalists at the PEN / Faulkner Award .
  14. ↑ a b Jerry Harkavy: Ford Aims to Move on From Bascombe Books . In: The Washington Post, March 11, 2007.
  15. ^ Charles McGrath: A New Jersey State of Mind. In: The New York Times, October 26, 2006.
  16. ^ Huey Guagliardo: Perspectives on Richard Ford . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2000, ISBN 978-1-57806-234-8 , pp. Xx.
  17. ↑ "I do like a quiet life when I'm trying to write", "My biggest challenge is to stay in the book as long as I can, since I believe that I can make things better if I just concentrate and stay close. Young writers - and I was one - are often bothered by the worry of being able to finish a book. [...] I'm challenged nowadays, though, by a wish to stay in without finishing. Eventually I'll finish, or else there's no book there. ”Quotes from: Don Lee: About Richard Ford: A Profile . In: Plowshares , Issue 70, Fall 1996.
  18. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 14, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter F. (PDF; 815 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved January 14, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Ford, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 16, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Jackson (Mississippi)