Life and Letters of Jesse Hill Ford, Southern Writer with Annotations and Commentary

Description

Jesse Hill Ford’s novel Liberation of Lord Byron Jones (1965) was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, translated into eleven languages, and made into a major motion picture. Then, in 1970, Ford accidentally killed a black GI. The jury acquitted him, but the press did not. This is a fully annotated edition of 140 letters chosen from a collection of 2000 pages. Ford wrote all these letters to his editor, Edward A. Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly. The magazine published most of Ford’s thirty stories written during the 1960s, and the Atlantic Monthly Press published all of his longer works of fiction. These letters trace aspects of his career; creative development; recurring themes and motifs, including his love of the outdoors and sensitive portrayals of black characters; and Ford’s response to contemporary events and figures, including the death of President Kennedy. They detail his life as a craftsman in Humboldt, Tennessee in the 1960s, his travels from the Caribbean to California and back to Nashville in the 1970s, his difficulties with money, wives, weight, and alcohol. It is also the story of a friendship between a writer who has frequently been compared to Faulkner, and an editor, whom she compares to Maxwell Perkins. This letter collection ends in 1980, but the time spanning 1980-1995 is covered in an Afterword. During this time, he was a screenwriter in Hollywood, a columnist for USA Today, and a creative writing professor. Tragically, he committed suicide shortly after this volume went to print. The book contains a preface by one of his “star” graduates, best-selling writer Richard North Patterson. Author Anne Cheney knew Ford for more than twenty years, and the footnotes and introductions detail their thorough interviews during the ten-year creation of the volume.