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Passion and Craft
CONVERSATIONS WITH NOTABLE WRITERS
Edited by Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver
University of Illinois Press, 1998
      The twelve contemporary fiction writers interviewed in Passion and
        Craft go beyond the merely autobiographical, revealing that, despite
        their differences, they share passionate devotion and discipline for their
        craft.
      Included are Richard Ford, winner in 1995 of both the Pulitzer Prize
        and the PEN/Faulkner Award; Gina Berriault, 1997 winner of the National
        Book Critics Circle Award; Bobbie Ann Mason; T. Coraghessan Boyle; Rick
        Bass; Leonard Michaels; Christopher Tilghman; Thom Jones; Julia Alvarez;
        Andre Dubus; Jayne Anne Phillips; and Tobias Wolff.
      Their comments will interest readers devoted to their novels and stories,
        other writers, and aspiring writers.
 
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front cover of Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism
Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism
Ian McGuire
University of Iowa Press, 2015
Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism examines the work of award-winning American novelist and short story writer Richard Ford, and places it firmly in the context of contemporary debates about the role and meaning of literary realism in a postmodern environment. In this fresh study of Ford’s oeuvre, Ian McGuire argues that Ford’s work is best understood as a form of pragmatic realism and thus positions him as part of a deeply rooted and ongoing American debate about the nature of realism and pragmatism. This debate, which reaches back to transcendentalist thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and continues on to today, questions the meaning of independence and the relationship between the self and history. In this context, McGuire explores Ford’s deep engagement with American literary and philosophical traditions and repositions his work in its appropriate intellectual and literary context.

McGuire also uses this idea of pragmatic realism to mount a larger defense of contemporary realist writing and uses Ford’s example to argue that realism itself remains a useful and necessary critical category. Contemporary realism, rather than being merely conventional or reactionary, as some of its critics have called it, can offer its proponents an aesthetically and philosophically sophisticated way of engaging with and contesting the particularities of contemporary, even postmodern, experience.

In offering this new reading of Richard Ford’s fiction, as well as a fresh understanding of the realist impulse in contemporary American fiction, both become richer, more resonant, and more immediate—reaching both backward into the past and forward to involve themselves in important contemporary debates about history, postmodernity, and moral relativism.
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