The Bascombe Novels: Written and Introduced by Richard Ford [Hardcover]

A trilogy of brilliant novels—The Sportswriter,Independence Day, andThe Lay of the Land—that charts the life and times of one of the most beloved and enduring characters in modern fiction.

 

When we meet Frank Bascombe inThe Sportswriter, his unguarded voice instantly wins us over and pulls us into a life that has been irrevocably changed—by the loss of a marriage, a career, a child. We then follow Frank, ever laconic and observant, throughIndependence DayandThe Lay of the Land, witnessing his fortune’s rise and his family’s fragmentation. With finely honed prose and an eye that captures the most subtle nuances of the human condition—all its pathos and beauty and strangeness—Ford transforms this ordinary man’s life into a riveting, moving parable of life in America today.

“With a mastery second to none, Richard Ford has created a character we know as well as our next-door neighbors. Frank Bascombe has earned himself a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape, but he has done so with a wry wit and a fin de siècle wisdom that is very much his own.” —The New York Times Book ReviewRichard Fordis the author of six novels and three collections of stories. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award forIndependence Dayand the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction. He lives in New York and Maine.I N T R O D U C T I O N
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Over the last twenty years, goodwilled readers have occasionally asked me if Frank Bascombe, the yearning, sometimes vexatious, narrator of the three novels that make up this sizeable volume – if Frank Bascombe was intended to be an American ‘‘everyman?’’ By this I think these readers mean: is Frank at least partly an emblem? Poised there in the final clattering quadrant of the last centurl{