“A Cautionary Brilliance”: Remarks Upon Accepting the Fitzgerald Award

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), and Let Me Be Frank with You (2014), among many other works, accepted the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature at the 19th Annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival in Rockville, Maryland, on 10 October 2015. In his acceptance speech, Ford discusses the pros and cons of both early and late success and Fitzgerald’s relevance for contemporary writers. Ultimately, the author insists, Fitzgerald inspires empathy in him for writers who exhibit “the aspiration to do celestial work—and occasionally doing it.”