SOURCE: "Novelist's View: Real Estate and the National Psyche," in The New York Times, November 5, 1995, sec. 9, p. 7.

[In the following interview, Ford talks about the realty industry and how he used his experience with real estate agents to create the character of Frank Bascombe in Independence Day.]

When the novelist Richard Ford sees Michael Wilkinson showing French Quarter property to potential clients, he stops his car and sticks his head out the window to say hello. "I always ask him, 'Read my book yet?'" Mr. Ford said, "And he always says, 'No.'"

So much for the great relationship between literature and life. Real estate agents who read Mr. Ford's new novel Independence Day, published by Alfred A. Knopf, may think that the author is one of them. He's not. And his closest friend in real estate, Mr. Wilkinson, hasn't even read his book. But the New...