Richard Ford

Ford has led a most interesting life, even by the inflated standards of a profession where outrageous biographies are as common as dust jacket hyperbole. He’s been a high school baseball coach, an editor at American Druggist, and a sportswriter. Then there’s his fiction, which has garnered enough critical hosannas and awards (his 1995 novel Independence Day was the first book ever to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award) that Ford could be forgiven for kicking back a little. Why not ride out the backstretch of his career by working the lecture circuit, teaching in MFA programs, and floating the occasional short story? It might seem like that’s what Ford’s been doing since he hit pay dirt, but he’s always been a methodical writer and something of a restless character. He has lived in fourteen U.S. states and France and Mexico, which is perhaps fitting for a man who spent part of his childhood living in his grandfather’s hotel. That footloose strain runs through all of Ford’s fiction, whether he’s writing about shiftless characters in Montana or Frank Bascombe, the beleaguered suburban hero of Ford’s best known novels, The Sportswriter and Independence Day. And time and again, it seems as if his characters come face-to-face with some version of Bascombe’s famous and troubling revelation, “There are no transcendent themes in life.” Adath Jeshurun Congregation, 10500 Hillside Lane W., Minnetonka; 952-847-8637