One of America’s leading authors, Professor Richard Ford has been awarded the prestigious Hadada Award for lifetime achievement from The Paris Review, joining the distinguished ranks of winners as Joan Didion, William Styron, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth. He joins Columbia’s own Professor Emeritus Richard Howard and Professor Deborah Eisenberg who received the awards in 2017 and 2019. Ford will receive the award from Bruce Springsteen, a fan, who has called Ford’s work “poignant and hilarious.”
Most recently, Ford was honored with the 2019 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. For over three decades, he has been publishing prize-winning short stories and novels, earning him both praise in the literary world and frequent appearances on the best-seller lists.
His 1995 novel Independence Day was the first book to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the esteemed Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Perhaps best known for the Bascombe Trilogy that immortalized the suburban New Jersey Everyman Frank Bascombe, Ford trained his telescope on the singed battleground of middle class life: marriage, family, and community which have undergone dramatic shifts. He followed Baby Boomer Bascombe from his early career as he scuffled along from sportswriter to real estate businessman through various stages of disenchantment in the Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank With You. In its entirety, the series offers an intimate and unembellished fly-on-the-wall realism typical of Ford’s oeuvre. Writing in the fall 1996 issue of The Paris Review, Bonnie Lyons declares that “in Frank Bascombe, Ford has created one of the most complex and memorable characters of our time.”
An accomplished practitioner of the short story form as well, Ford’s work has been widely anthologized and has also garnered him both a Rea Award for the Short Story and a PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the form.
Recently, Ford’s memoir of his parents, Between Them: Remembering My Parents, separate novella-length portraits of his mother and father, was hailed in The Guardian as “extraordinary studies of how we experience loss—and recall it.”
The Spring Revel 2020 honoring Richard Ford will take place on Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at Cipriani. Tickets can be purchased here.
