Richard Ford is the author of Rock Springs, a collection of stories, and four previous novels: A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter and Wildlife.

Ford has been a Guggenheim fellow (1977-78), and a two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow (1979-80, 1985-86). Ford won a PEN/Faulkner citation for fiction award for The Sportswriter in 1987.