SOURCE: Dupuy, Edward. “The Confessions of an Ex-Suicide: Relenting and Recovering in Richard Ford's The Sportswriter.” Southern Literary Journal 23, no. 1 (fall 1990): 93-103.

In the following essay, Dupuy praises Ford's The Sportswriter as a life-affirming novel that unites the themes of happiness and loss through the effective use of a first-person narrative voice.

We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison 

—T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

To be is just as great as to perceive or tell. 

—Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass

Richard Ford is onto something. In his third novel, The Sportswriter, he has created a new character in the American literary landscape: a happy man. Frank Bascombe may not seem to fit the mold for what is often considered happiness. He is, after all, a man of losses, a man with a long list of titles...