SOURCE: Schroth, S.J., Raymond A. “America's Moral Landscape in the Fiction of Richard Ford.” Christian Century (1 March 1989): 227-30.

In the following essay, Schroth asserts that, in The Sportswriter, Ford successfully presents “a broad and complex cross-section of American middle-class life.”

I discovered Richard Ford while looking for a novel to accompany Tocqueville, Habits of the Heart, and the travel narratives of Jonathan Raban and William Least Heat Moon in a course on American character. I sought one that would help illuminate the moral consciousness of America in the '80s, a nation bogged down and hemmed in by the individualism it had long touted as its strength; a tough and belligerent nation, still stunned and whimpering from the Vietnam war; a country whose politicians were campaigning on “family values,” while it seemed that hardly a family was not sundered by abandonment or divorce; a post-Christian society, even...