When Forrest is called to the principal's office, he meets Bear Bryant, who asks if he'd considered playing college football.Īfter high school, Forrest takes a test at a local army recruitment center, and is told he is 'Temporarily Deferred.'. He gains popularity as a football player, making the All State team. While he enjoys the books, he does not do well on tests. He reads Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and two other books that he does not remember. Miss Henderson, with whom Forrest is infatuated, gives him reading lessons. The title character retells adventures ranging from shrimp boating and ping pong championships, to thinking about his childhood love, as he bumbles his way through American history, with everything from the Vietnam War to college football becoming part of the story.įorrest Gump, named after General Nathan Bedford Forrest, narrates the story of his life. The novel was adapted into a feature-length film by Paramount Pictures in 1994. He is survived by his wife, Susan.Forrest Gump is a 1986 novel by Winston Groom. He became a member of the Alabama Writers’ Hall of Fame 2018 class.

When Groom received the prestigious Harper Lee Award in 2011. After moving to New York City, he completed his first novel, Better Times Than These, set in the Vietnam War and published in 1978. Groom later worked as a reporter for the Washington Star, but gave that up to devote himself to fiction. He graduated from the University of Alabama in with an English degree in 1965, and embarked on a tour of duty in Vietnam. Groom wrote Forrest Gump in six weeks.īorn March 23, 1944, in Washington, D.C., and raised in Mobile County, Alabama, Groom turned to writing in college. Groom said the novel was inspired by a story his father related about a neighbor’s child who displayed savant behavior.

And that’s, I think, where I hooked ‘em.” “If I could convince, persuasively, a reader that Coach Paul Bryant would take an idiot and put him on the football team, they’d believe anything.Once you hook your reader, they’ll go for the rest. In a 2014 interview with the Tuscaloosa News, Groom said the novel was “a farce, and that’s hard to do.

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