Independence Day remains the only novel to have won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, which tells you something about where Richard Ford stands. Add the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, a Princess of Asturias Award, and a 2018 film adaptation of Wildlife that brought his work to a new generation of readers, and the case for collecting him is straightforward. Richard Ford signed first editions, especially early Bascombe titles and the debut A Piece of My Heart, are genuinely scarce in fine condition and well worth serious attention.
Canada Richard Ford Signed 1st Edition 2012 Hardcover HarperCollins Novel
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Canada by Richard Ford SIGNED, FIRST EDITION - FIRST PRINTING-Very Good
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← Back to full listingsAbout Richard Ford
Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944, the only child of a travelling salesman who died when Ford was sixteen. He grew up between Mississippi and Little Rock, Arkansas, studied at Michigan State University, spent one uncomfortable semester in law school, and eventually found his way to the MFA programme at the University of California, Irvine. He has described his route into writing as indirect and unhurried, which is fitting for an author whose fiction tends to treat the slow accumulation of ordinary life as its primary subject.
His early novels, including A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), established his voice without quite finding his subject. That came with The Sportswriter (1986), which introduced Frank Bascombe, a former novelist turned sportswriter living in suburban New Jersey, navigating grief, divorce, and the quiet disappointments of middle-class American life. The book was something new: a novel of radical ordinariness, in which nothing much happens and almost everything feels significant. It was a PEN/Faulkner finalist and put Ford firmly at the centre of modern literary fiction.
The sequel, Independence Day (1995), went further. It became the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, a combination no book had achieved before or has since. Ford continued Bascombe’s story across three more volumes, The Lay of the Land (2006), Let Me Be Frank With You (2014), and Be Mine (2023), tracing one man’s life from middle age into mortality with patience, wit, and an unfashionable commitment to realism.
His other fiction has been equally well received. Wildlife (1990), a spare, restrained novel about a teenager watching his parents’ marriage collapse in rural Montana, was adapted into a 2018 film directed by Paul Dano, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan. Canada (2012) was a New York Times bestseller, and his story collections, particularly Rock Springs (1987), are among the most admired in contemporary American writing. In 2016 he received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in Spain, and in 2019 the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Now in his eighties, Ford teaches at Columbia University and continues to write and publish.
Collector’s Note
The fourth edition of Rome’s annual book festival, Libri Come, in March 2013, brought Richard Ford to the Auditorium Parco della Musica for a literary discussion entitled ‘How I Write My Books’. I had been a devoted reader of his for years, and the chance to hear him speak in person felt like something not to be missed.
Ford was in conversation with Italian novelist Sandro Veronesi, who spent rather a long time expounding his own theories before finally conceding the floor. When Ford did speak, he was immediately compelling – tall, silver-haired, with very pale blue eyes and a warm, mischievous manner that made him enormously likeable. He pushed back gently but firmly on Veronesi’s characterisation of Frank Bascombe as stoic, insisting instead on the fundamental optimism in his writing. “I would hate to think that I was stoico,” he said, with a laugh, before adding that trying to regenerate a damaged life was, to him, “potentially, if you’ll excuse my saying so, joyous.” In Rome, of all places, he suggested, the Bacchanalian personality ought to be well understood.
Afterwards, leaving the hall, I happened upon a Rai 3 radio interview being recorded in the foyer for the show Fahrenheit, in which Ford was joined, unexpectedly, by Salman Rushdie, who was in Rome to promote the Italian edition of his memoir Joseph Anton. An afternoon with not one, but two incredible literary encounters! To complete it, there was a signing session in the Auditorium bookshop, where I had a few moments to chat with Ford in person before he signed my copy of A Multitude of Sins with a warm personal inscription in his characteristic looping blue ink. It remains one of the most treasured pieces in my collection.
Illustration of Richard Ford based on a photograph by Deborah Swain for LivinginRome.net.