7.8 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Publisher Alfred A. Knopf Pages 464 pp Followed by The Lay of the Land | 3.9/5 Goodreads Language English Publication date June 13, 1995 Originally published 13 June 1995 Preceded by The Sportswriter Genre Novel | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (hardback & paperback) Awards Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Similar Works by Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners, Novels | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Independence Day is a 1995 novel by Richard Ford and the sequel to Ford's 1986 novel The Sportswriter. This novel is the second in what is now a four-part series. It was followed by The Lay of the Land (2006) and Let Me Be Frank With You (2014).
Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996, becoming the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.
The novel follows Frank Bascombe, a New Jersey real estate agent (and ex-sportwriter), through the titular holiday weekend as he visits his ex-wife, his troubled son, his current lover, the tenants of one of his properties, and some clients of his who have been having trouble finding the perfect house. It focuses in particular on a car trip with his son to the Basketball and Baseball halls of fame. It was well-reviewed, with Michiko Kakutani writing in The New York Times that "Mr. Ford has galvanized his reputation as one of his generation's most eloquent voices." Similar in form and common themes to John Updike's Rabbit novels, Independence Day is a pastoral meditation on a man reaching middle age and assessing his place in life and the greater world.