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161 Richard Ford Richard Ford is the author of six novels and three collections of short stories. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, he received his BA from Michigan State University. After a brief stint as a law student, Ford enrolled in the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine, where he studied with such writers as E. L. Doctorow and Oakley Hall. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a literature award from the Mississippi Academy of Arts and Letters, a Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library, and an Echoing Green Foundation Award. Ford has taught at the University of Michigan, Williams College, Princeton University, and Harvard University. He lives in Maine with his wife. A Piece of My Heart, 1976; The Ultimate Good Luck, 1981; The Sportswriter, 1986; Rock Springs, 1987 (stories); Wildlife, 1990; Independence Day, 1995; Women with Men, 1997 (stories); A Multitude of Sins, 2002 (stories); The Lay of the Land, 2006 Do you consider yourself a southern writer? A Piece of My Heart was set in Mississippi and in Arkansas. When I started writing it, I thought, “This is my subject, this is the thing I have to do. I have to write books that are set in the South, and they have to be about the South and things going on in the South because, after all, I’m a southerner and that’s what southerners do. They write about the South.” But when the book was reviewed, a lot of things were said about it which didn’t make me happy. One of the things that was said was that it was a southern book. I had kind of hoped that it would somehow—even though it was about the South—transcend its southernness, but nobody who talked about the book wanted it to transcend its southernness at all. They wanted it to be right in their Faulknerian mode and the Flannery 162 the INtervIewS O’Connor mode, which in some ways I guess it was. And I thought to myself, I have got to find a way to quit writing about the South, because if I don’t, I’m never going to be taken seriously. So I thought, “I am going to write a book in which the South does not figure at all.” My little joke to myself was that I went on writing about the South, but it was Mexico now, instead of Arkansas and Mississippi, where I had grown up. So The Ultimate Good Luck was a real conscious attempt to try to break the regional and also the stylistic mold and mode of writing about the South. I’m looking back on this now, maybe seeing things with more clarity than I did at the time. I thought that a book that was also a kind of genre book might be the thing that would sort of clear my palate, which it did. The Ultimate Good Luck is a sort of little noir book about some people who go down to Mexico to get a woman’s brother out of jail. It was rather purposefully influenced by Graham Greene. I’ve been a big Graham Greene fan for a long time, and I’ve admired his books very much, and I thought I could safely write a book that I knew he had influenced. It was during a time in my writing life that happens to all writers—when you know who your influences are and sometimes they take a rather conspicuous stylistic grip on you. I wanted to let that happen to me with The Ultimate Good Luck, because I wanted so to rid myself of Faulkner. I wanted to get away from all things southern as much as I could, so I just kind of let myself choose a style that I felt like I could handle. It was also strongly affected, I think, by Robert Stone’s book Dog Soldiers, which I profoundly admired. As I say, I’m looking back on it now and maybe seeing things with greater clarity, but I knew all those things. I knew I had to get away from the South or I would never be able to hold my head up as a writer. I didn’t think, and I don’t think now, that I had anything new to say about the South. Everything that I knew about the South, Faulkner or Miss Welty had already written. But the...

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