How I Got on

Part memoir, part literary criticism, How I Got On traces Richard Ford’s development as a novelist, from his early efforts to exceed the restraints of the "Southern novel" through his gradual movement toward the broader artistic terrain that would culminate in The Sportswriter. While grounded in his formative experiences in Mississippi, the narrative expands into a wider meditation on literary influence, the political novel, artistic inheritance, and the central question of how one gets better as a writer.

Ford reflects on a wide range of influences—from Stendhal to Faulkner to Benjamin and Welty, offering at once an impressive reading list and a model of serious literary apprenticeship. Born in 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi, Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, in 1976. Ford gained acclaim with The Sportswriter and its sequels, which follow the life of Frank Bascombe, one of his most enduring characters. Ford’s novel Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, making Ford the first author to receive both honors for the same book. He is also winner of Spain’s Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature, and his acclaimed novel Canada was awarded France’s Prix Femina. How I Got On represents an important contribution to Southern literary studies and, more significantly, a concise and compelling statement on the making of a novelist in the contemporary American tradition.