Richard Ford
Historical marker location:Born in Jackson in 1944, Richard Ford won critical acclaim with his first two novels, A Piece of My Heart (1976), and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). While he and his wife, Kristina Ford, lived in rural Coahoma County, Ford wrote The Sportswriter, which brought him international acclaim: the book was named one of Time magazine's top 100 novels published since the magazine's inception. The Sportswriter's protagonist, Frank Bascombe, later appears in Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), and the story collection, Let Me Be Frank With You (2014). Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996. In 2017, Ford wrote the memoir, Between Them, Remembering My Parents. He is an internationally-respected story-writer and cultural essayist. About his work, he says, “As a writer, I have the urge to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.".