In the following essay, Folks contrasts the treatment of central themes in Ford's The Sportswriter and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. Folks observes that Ford's novel focuses on the themes of family, intimacy, labor, and the need for social connection.

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.

In the following essay, Schroth asserts that, in The Sportswriter, Ford successfully presents “a broad and complex cross-section of American middle-class life.”