The Sportswriter is a 1986 novel by Richard Ford, and the first of five books of fiction to feature the protagonist Frank Bascombe.

The sequel to The Sportswriter is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day, published in 1995.

After the third installment in the series, titled The Lay of the Land, was published in 2006, the three books together are sometimes identified as "The Bascombe Trilogy."

[3] The latest book in the Bascombe series, titled Be Mine, was published in 2023.

The novel was named one of Time magazine's five best books of 1986 and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.