It’s the birthday of acclaimed author Richard Ford, whose 1995 novel Independence Day was the first novel ever to win both the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award. Of his Pulitzer, Ford has said that he only won because Philip Roth didn’t write a better book.

Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944, the only child of Edna and Parker Carroll Edna Ford. His father was a traveling salesman, and his parents loved each other and loved him and treated him well, making for a cozy and dull childhood. (Not a promising start for a writer. Let’s all try to feel sorry for him.) Then his father died when Ford was only sixteen, and Ford moved to Arkansas to live with a grandmother and step-grandfather who ran a hotel. This began to open his world a bit as he observed how people lived behind hotel doors. He went on to study hotel administration at Michigan State University but switched to literature, and with a great deal of effort—he was a naturally unremarkable student and struggled with dyslexia—he did well.

After graduating, Ford tried law, then started writing, but after some success with his early novels, gave it up for several years of sports writing. When that job ended, he turned back to novel writing and wrote The Sportswriter about novelist-turned-sportswriter Frank Bascombe as he deals with the death of his son. (However much Bascombe might or might not resemble his creator, Ford and his wife Kristina have never had children, by choice. Ford said in a 2003 interview with The Guardian, “I hate children.”) The novel was extremely well-received, as was Ford’s next book, Rock Springs, a short story collection, which stories landed him in the category of “dirty realists”—writers like Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Ann Beattie who wrote in spare, minimal language about people with spare, lonely lives. (Everyone knows Carver is brilliant—is there a more thrilling moment in short story literature than the ending of “Cathedral”?—but have you read “Hunters in the Snow” by Wolff? Very dark and very funny, it’s one of my all-time favorites. Stay tuned for Wolff’s birthday in June.)

Ford wrote another novel, Wildlife (1990), and began engaging in a lot of highfalutin editing (Best American Short Stories 1990, for example, and some Granta projects), and then brought Frank Bascombe back in his masterpiece, Independence Day. In this novel, Bascombe, now a real estate agent, spends the 4th of July weekend visiting sports halls of fame with his troubled teenage son. Bascombe’s story continues in The Lay of the Land (2006) and Let Me Be Frank with You, a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Ford’s most recent work is a memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents (2017).

Fun fact: Ford adopted his direct style of opening short stories from his good friend Raymond Carver, who adopted it from Chekov. Which means that, you know, Chekov was a major influence on both.  Just wanted to point that out. About Chekov. Being a major influence and all.

Enjoy all the riches and fruits of Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.