Richard Ford

A woman and man, parted a quarter of a century, reunite in a bar in New Orleans as the St Patrick's Day parade goes by. A divorced suburban dad helps his daughter pick out a card for her friend who's moving away. A group of friends in late middle age, all once promising, reunite for dinner when one of their number loses her husband, but the gathering splinters when bitter revelations about their shared past emerge. Two teenage boys sit in a drive-in,...

"How is it that we come to consider our parents as people with rich and intense lives that include but also exclude us? Richard Ford's parents-Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman-were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the twentieth century. Married in 1928, they lived 2alone together3 on the road, traveling throughout the South. Eventually they had one child,...

In 1956, Dell Parsons' family came to a stop in Great Falls, Montana, the way many military families did after the war. His father, Bev, was a talkative airman from Alabama with an optimistic and easy-scheming nature. Their mother Neeva - shy, artistic - was alienated from their father's small-town world. It was more bad instincts and bad luck that Dell's parents decided to rob the bank. They weren't reckless people. In the days following the arrest,...

A sixteen-year-old boy faces adulthood in a small Montana town, observing love, marriage, adultery, the working life, and unemployment.

After his father loses his job and leaves to fight wildfires, a teenage boy is left to cope with his mother's reaction to their situation.