The Sportswriter (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Richard Ford
- First Published: 1986
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: Teaching or teachers, New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Parents and children, Authors or writers, New York City, Literature, Writing, 1980’s, New Jersey, Divorce, Suburban life, Sports
- Locales: Detroit, MI, New York, Florida, New Jersey
The Sportswriter is one of Ford's most acclaimed novels, the one that firmly established him as a major American writer. Ford asserts that the novel was written in answer to his wife's question, “Why don’t you write a book about someone happy?” His intention was to produce a protagonist without irony who always says what he believes. Frank Bascombe is a failed novelist turned sportswriter, which he thinks of as not “a real profession but more of an agreeable frame of mind, a way of going about things rather than things you exactly do or know.”
The “sport” of...
[The entire page is 841 words long]
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