Richard Ford

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Richard Ford

(1944- )

“Romancier américain tout court”

« To create a literature worthy of America »

Richard Ford was born on February 16, 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi. His parents, Parker Carrol and Edna, leave Arkansas (family roots) for Mississippi.
Ford’s father is a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch Company .(“I was a bonehead kid living in Jackson, Mississippi, with parents who neither one went to college”).
In 1952 his father suffers a heart attack. As a result, the family moves into the Marion Hotel managed by Ford’s maternal grandfather in Little Rock, Arkansas. Growing up in a hotel shapes Ford’s world-view and gives him a taste for itinerant life. He is exposed to travelers, people on the move, the effect of which is omnipresent in his fiction. The death of Parker Carroll Ford in 1960 is experienced as a traumatic event. Life’s impermanence irrupting into his life signifies the need for several adjustments ( his mother Edna has to get a job) and is experienced as a vivid exposure to “life on the edge.” Home for the adolescent in search of his own self becomes a variable concept, questioning the notion of family, privacy, intimacy...
In 1962 Ford enrolls at Michigan State University, changes majors (from hotel management to English) and receives B.A in English in 1966. He starts a teaching career in a junior high school, quits and decides to enlist in the Marines, receives discharge, attends Washington University Law school in Saint-Louis in 1967 for one semester, marries Kristina Hensley, and decides to become a writer. In 1970 Ford receives a  Master of Fine Arts Degree in creative writng from the University of California (Irvine).

Author of  5 novels:
A Piece of my Heart ( 1976),  The Ultimate Good Luck( 1981), The Sportswriter ( 1982), Independence Day( 1995) The Lay of the Land( 2006), of collections of stories: Rock Springs ( 1987), Wildlife(1990), Women with Men ( 1997), A Multitude of Sins( 2002).

Ford has published many stories, essays and edited anthologies. A play American Tropical, The Actors Theatre of Louisville, is produced in November 1983.The film Bright Angel, based on Ford’s screenplay is released in 1991.  

Ford has also been a lecturer and visiting professor in many American Universities:

• 1975: Assistant professor at the University of Michigan
• 1979: Assistant professor at Williams College
• 1981: Lecturer at Princeton University
• 1992: Lecturer at the University of Michigan
• 1994: Lecturer at Harvard University
• 1997: Visiting professor at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Awards:

• 1987: Receives citation for PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction as well as the Mississippi Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
• 1988: Receives New York Public Library “Literary Lion” Award and Northwest Booksellers Award for Fiction.
• 1989: Receives the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature
• 1993: Wins Mississippi Governor’s Award for Artistic achievement as well as the Lyndhurst Prize.
• 1994: Receives the Doctor Honoris Causa from Rennes 2 University, France
• 1995: Wins the REA Award for the Short Story.
• 1996: Wins Pulitzer Prize and Pen/ Faulkner award for  Independence Day
  Named Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government
• 1998: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters