Independence Day

Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an "Existence Period," selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth-of-July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life. Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception.

"Most reviewers of Independence Day have concluded that Richard Ford is one of the great American writers of our time. Surely they underestimate him. Anybody who can keep the reader going through 451 pages about a holiday weekend in the life of a New Jersey realtor... is more than a great writer of our time. He may be the greatest writer of all time... Ford’s next novel could be about dry-walling or data entry or developing a filing system for an insurance broker’s home office in Akron. It doesn’t matter. Everyone will love it, because, for dead-on dialogue and a perfect rendering of small-town and suburban distractedness, writing doesn’t get much better than this."  -  Barbara Ehrenreich, The New Republic

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.