… was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on this date in 1944. The Writer’s Almanac had a particularly good essay on Ford two years ago. It begins:
[Ford is] best known as the author of the novels The Sportswriter (1985) and Independence Day (1995). He has said that one of the reasons he became a writer is that he was mildly dyslexic as a child and had to concentrate on words more intensely than most people. He also lived across the street from novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty, and his mother used to point her out to him as someone to look up to.
This year The Writer’s Almanac has this:
Ford has spent most of his adult life moving from city to city with his wife. He’s lived in fourteen states, as well as France and Mexico. At one point he divided his time between a townhouse on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, a house in Montana, and a plantation house in Mississippi. He said, “The really central thing is that, no matter where I move, I always write and I’m married to the same girl. All that other stuff is just filigree.”
Ford’s novels are particular favorites of NewMexiKen.