They settled in Jackson, Mississippi, where their only child was born on February 16 1944. Together they - and I always say it about my wife Kristina and me - they made one whole person." Like one of the characters in A Piece of My Heart, Ford's father was a travelling salesman, and Edna realised she was pregnant when they were on the road, selling starch. "My father was from an Irish background," Ford says. "I don't mean eating dirt, but she was born on a dirt floor." At the age of 18, she met Parker. "My mother was from really poor circumstances," says Ford. Edna and Parker Carroll Ford were born in Arkansas, shortly before the depression. Vitamin pills clutter the dressing table, while in the kitchen sits the latest edition of the New York Times and a copy of a Martin Amis novel, somewhat soggy round the edges where the dog has chewed it.įord's story begins in the south. Yet he seems happy enough in his broad, timbered house overlooking the bay. He lives in Maine, a region he describes in his book, A Multitude of Sins, as "small in scale, profusely scenic, annoyingly remote, exclusive and crowded". The taut, moody character who stares out from the dust-jackets of his books is less doleful in person, his gaze less urgent. In 1995, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award for his novel Independence Day. Since then, he has written five novels and three collections of short stories, edited both the Granta Book of the American Short Story and the Granta Book of the American Long Story and racked up numerous prizes. It is 27 years since he published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, in 1976. His is the male American voice of motels and freeways and love derailed. It is a most successful impression of not being Hemingway, yet Ford has undeniably carved himself out as a man's man, and an all-hunting, all-fishing, Harley-riding sort of a writer. He is fiddling with a fishing rod, cursing loudly as the line whips back and tangles - the fish are long gone.
Standing on the dock by his New England home, he reels off the list of frequent comparisons. R ichard Ford is not Hemingway, nor is he Clint Eastwood, Raymond Carver or Bruce Springsteen.
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