SOURCE: Griffin, Larry D. “Richard Ford.” In A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English, edited by Erin Fallon, R. C. Feddersen, James Kurtzleben, Maurice A. Lee, and Susan Rochette-Crawley, pp. 156-60. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Griffin provides an overview of the criticism on Ford's short stories and provides his own analysis of them.

Biography

Richard Ford was born on February 16, 1944, in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of Parker Ford, a traveling salesman, and his wife, Edna, a homemaker. Ford grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and Little Rock, Arkansas, then attended Michigan State University as an undergraduate. He studied law at Washington University in St. Louis, served briefly in the U.S. Marine Corps, and in 1970 received his M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine, where he studied under E. L. Doctorow. In 1968, Ford married Kristina Hensley, who had a...