Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944 and raised in Jackson and Little Rock, Arkansas. He received his B.A. from Michigan State University in 1966, where he studied literature and began to write stories. After a brief stint at Washington University in St. Louis, he went on to obtain his M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. He has taught at Princeton University, Williams College and the University of Michigan.

Richard Ford has written five novels, A Piece of my Heart [1976], The Ultimate Good Luck [1981], The Sportswriter [1985], Wildlife [1990] and the critically acclaimed Independence Day [1995]. His collection of short stories, Rock Springs, appeared in 1987. Women with Men (Three stories) appeared in 1997. Ford wrote the screenplay for the film "Bright Angel," which was based on two stories from Rock Springs. The film starred Sam Shephard and was shot entirely on location in Montana.

Paul Gray, writing in Time Magazine, said, " The Sportswriter established a glittering reputation. The stories in Rock Springs confirm it." Michiko Kakutani, reviewing Rock Springs in The New York Times, said, "Stunning…this volume should confirm Ford's emergence as one of the most compelling and eloquent storytellers of his generation. Carolyn See, writing in the Los Angeles Times said, "There is a strange two-way mirror in America, Richard Ford reminds us. On our side, we see only ourselves. Over on 'their' side they wonder how they got there and long for 'just a normal life like other people had.'…these stories are exquisitely written."

His short stories have been widely anthologized and have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Granta. He edited the Granta Book of the American Short Story [1992].

He and his wife, Kristina, a city planner, moved to Montana in 1983, when she took a job as planning director of Missoula. There, they lived in a remote cabin in the Highwood Mountains of Montana, about thirty miles from Great Falls, the setting of the novel Wildlife and a story in Rock Springs.

Ford's stories are set in Montana and Wyoming and are mostly told in the first person. The characters are people who are uprooted and adrift, with no permanent ties to a place or each other. Transience is a major theme in his fiction and reflects his own need for change. "Moving. I've done it a lot. Twenty times, probably in twenty years," he said in a Harper's Magazine article. "Longing's at the heart of it, I guess. Longing that overtakes me like a fast car on the freeway and makes me willing to withstand a feeling of personal temporariness."

In citing Ford's work, the 1995 Rea Award Jurors Richard Bausch, Ethan Canin and Mary Morris said,

"Richard Ford's power lies in the deceiving simplicity of his language, in the complexity of the emotions he explores, and in the extraordinary tenderness with which most of the people in his stories go about the solitary business of loving, and seeking love. His stories are exemplars of the form. For their clarity, for their unfailing grace, their intellectual beauty, they deserve to be celebrated."

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