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Richard Ford

(b.1944)

Richard Ford is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the widely anthologized story collection Rock Springs.

Ford lived for many years in the French Quarter and then in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, where his wife Kristina was the executive director of the city planning commission. He now lives in Maine where he teaches at Bowdoin College.

Awards: Andrew Carnegie (2013), PEN (2001), Pulitzer (1996) see all

Genres: Literary Fiction

Series

Frank Bascombe
   1. The Sportswriter (1986)
   2. Independence Day (1995)
   3. The Lay of the Land (2006)
   4. Let Me Be Frank With You (2014)
   5. Be Mine (2023)

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)
   Sorry For Your Trouble (2020)

Anthologies edited

   The Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992)
   The Granta Book of the American Long Story (1998)
   The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (2007)
   Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar (2011)

Series contributed to

Best American Short Stories
The Best American Short Stories 1990 (1990) (with Shannon Ravenel)
The Best American Short Stories 1991 (1991)

Non fiction show

Books containing stories by Richard Ford

Darkness Eternal (2025)
(Warhammer 40,000)

100 Years of the Best American Short Stories (2015)
(Best American Short Stories)
edited by
Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor

By the Book (2014)
Writers On Literature and the Literary Life
edited by
Pamela Paul

More books

Awards

	2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction : Canada
	2001 PEN/Malamud Award
	1996 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction : Independence Day
	1996 PEN/Faulkner Award : Independence Day

Award nominations

	2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (nominee) : Let Me Be Frank With You
	1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (nominee) : Independence Day
	1987 PEN/Faulkner Award (nominee) : The Sportswriter

Richard Ford recommends

Among Friends (2025)
Hal Ebbott
"In the way that a forceful intelligence or an infectious voice or a fresh vision can alter how we observe and answer the world, Among Friends brought me into its cool environs and made me engage my days differently. It's no small accomplishment for a first novel, or for any novel."

Liquid (2025)
Mariam Rahmani
"Liquid is sleek, gimlet-eyed, stylish and doubtless smarter than the average reader-myself. But it is ever prescient and often very witty about the fate of love among thirty-somethings-indeed, among us all-as we enter the brave new world ahead."

Come to the Window (2024)
Howard Norman
"Simply put, Come to the Window is a powerful, daring, eloquent and in all ways splendid novel."

Wolf at the Table (2024)
Adam Rapp
"Wolf at the Table is a masterful novel - strange and affecting, and immersive reading. Adam Rapp peers into the dark heart of America with shrewd and eerie grace, the likes of which I have not encountered since Kosinski."

The Midcoast (2022)
Adam White
"In deft, knowing, and crystalline prose, Adam White writes, in essence, the novel about the Maine coast."

Mercy Street (2022)
Jennifer Haigh
"Mercy Street is a savvy, keen-eyed, witty, wise, and altogether luminous novel. A triumph. Jennifer Haigh is a young master of this form. Though, at day's end, I'd read her just to read her."

The Magician (2021)
Colm Tóibín
"As with everything Colm Tóibín sets his masterful hand to, The Magician is a great imaginative achievement -- immensely readable, erudite, worldly and knowing, and fully realized."

The Abstainer (2020)
Ian McGuire
"The Abstainer is truly terrific—a can’t-put-down book. It’s nothing less than a tight and spare and suspense-filled noir novel, masterfully set in 1860s Britain and America. And like all superb historical novels, it seems as modern and as contemporary as this morning."

Pizza Girl (2020)
Jean Kyoung Frazier
"To Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier brings a flawless ear for language, great inventiveness, unfailing intelligence and empathy, and best of all a rare and shimmering wit. This novel has immense appeal."

If You Leave Me (2018)
Crystal Hana Kim
"If You Leave Me is graced with truly wonderful writing; great poise, lyricism, intelligence, and an utterly engrossing portrayal of life."

Lake Success (2018)
Gary Shteyngart
"Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly; its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity."

First Snow, Last Light (2017)
Wayne Johnston
"Wayne Johnston is a wondrous writer - of rich, irresistibly readable prose. He possesses a deft intelligence and a rare sense of what’s truly interesting to tell about life."

Midwinter Break (2017)
Bernard MacLaverty
"MacLaverty's prose is deceptively simple and rewardingly straight-forward and efficient. But what he writes about in this much anticipated novel - the resilience and stress-lines of human love experienced over much time - is anything but simple and straight-forward. It’s the stuff of life."

Larchfield (2017)
Polly Clark
"Larchfield is that rarest of rare first novels - a book that actually achieves its great ambition. I found it so immensely readable; it's brainy, verbally acute and knowing, with an ingenious literary historical premise that it impressively (and artfully) carries off right in front of your eyes. It's work of considerable talent."

Teethmarks On My Tongue (2016)
Eileen Battersby
"Teethmarks On My Tongue is an utterly stirring (first!)novel. Its stylish, perfectly observed, ambitious and complete."

The Summer Goddess (2016)
Joanne Hall
"The short, sharp prose places you in the thick of it..."

The Girls (2016)
Emma Cline
"The Girls is a brilliant and intensely consuming novel - imposing not just for a writer so young, but for any writer, any time."

February (2010)
Lisa Moore
"An astonishing writer."

Cryers Hill (2007)
Kitty Aldridge
"Mercurial, deft and wondrous in its sentences and uncanny descriptions. Grave, knowing, melancholy, often extremely funny and ultimately optimistic."

A Student of Living Things (2006)
Susan Richards Shreve
"Stylish and sleek and tightly configured... steeped in our incongruities and potent mysteries - most especially those of the heart."

All the Men Are Sleeping (2002)
D R MacDonald
"Such great and captivating fluency with the physical, the natural and most particularly with the human realm of events. These wonderful stories have been a revelation to me...Mr. MacDonald is an extraordinary writer."

Great Dream of Heaven (2002)
Sam Shepard
"These stories are irresistible."

Storm Riders (2000)
Craig Lesley
"Storm Riders is an exacting, serious and generous novel. Its great virtue is that it's wise as well as clear-sighted in its faith in human beings. As I read I continually felt (as I rarely do) that this book could be about me."

Dream State (1995)
Moira Crone
"These are intelligent, satisfying, and often extremely witty stories."

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