Richard Ford was born on this day in 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi. He graduated from Michigan State and taught in the Flint school system for a short time before entering the Marines. Shortly after being discharged for contacting hepatitis he met and later married Kristina Hensley.
Though Ford suffered mild dyslexia he focused on literature and after dropping out of law school he entered the creative writing program at University of California, Irvine. He graduated with an MFA in 1970.
Richard Ford published his first novel “A Piece of My Heart” in 1976. It would be five years before he published his next work, “The Ultimate Good Luck” in 1981. Following that he took work as a writer for Inside Sports, a sporting magazine headquartered in New York. When the magazine folded a year later he failed to get work at Sports Illustrated so he began work on one of his most famous works, “The Sportswriter” . It was published in 1986 and won praise from critics and the book became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction.
Ford’s next novel Rock Springs would salt his reputation as part of the ‘dirty realism’ movement in fiction which included authors like Tobias Wolfe and Raymond Carver.
In 1995 Ford’s career peaked with the publication of “Independence Day”. This novel became a best seller and would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize and a PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction. Ford has continued to publish and was considered in the running this past year for the Nobel. His novel “Canada” was a multi award winning novel.
Ford’s novels are very collectable and signed copies can fetch good money. As an investment, his early works yield the best results. Come and check out the selection we have at Landmark Books.