Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA at the University of California, Irvine in 1970. He lives in Billings, Montana.
He is best known for the Frank Bascombe books: The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), Let Me Be Frank With You (2014) and Be Mine (2023). Independence Day was the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year.