Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.

His novel Wildlife was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name, and in 2023 Ford published Be Mine, his fifth work of fiction chronicling the life of Frank Bascombe.

After graduating, he taught junior high school in Flint, Michigan, and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps but was discharged after contracting hepatitis.

[7] Ford briefly attended law school but quit and participated with the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 1970.

[9] Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart,[10] the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in the Mississippi River, during 1976, and followed it with The Ultimate Good Luck during 1981.

[4] Despite good notices, the books sold little, and Ford retired from fiction writing to become a writer for the New York magazine Inside Sports.

During 1995, Ford published the novel Independence Day, a sequel to The Sportswriter, featuring the continued story of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe.

[16] During the same year, Ford was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement for that genre.

[19] During the intervening years, Ford lived in other locations, usually in the United States, as he pursued a peripatetic teaching career.

[20] During 2008 Ford was an adjunct professor of the Oscar Wilde Centre with the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, teaching in the Masters programme in creative writing.

[21] Starting December 29, 2010, Ford assumed the job of senior fiction professor at the University of Mississippi during the autumn of 2011, replacing Barry Hannah, who died during March 2010.

In April 2013, Ford read from a new Frank Bascombe story without revealing to the audience whether it was part of a longer work.

It did not win the prize but the selection committee praised the book for its "unflinching series of narratives, set in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, insightfully portraying a society in decline.

He has described his sense of language as "a source of pleasure in itself—- all of its corporeal qualities, its syncopations, moods, sounds, the way things look on the page".

[32] Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Walker Percy.

"[33] Ford's works of fiction "dramatize the breakdown of such cultural institutions as marriage, family, and community," and his "marginalized protagonists often typify the rootlessness and nameless longing ... pervasive in a highly mobile, present-oriented society in which individuals, having lost a sense of the past, relentlessly pursue their own elusive identities in the here and now.

"[35] Ford once sent Alice Hoffman a copy of one of her books with bullet holes in it after she angered him by unfavorably reviewing The Sportswriter.