Here's what he said about that in the Times last year.
...In the mid-1980s, the novelist, a former sportswriter, lived in Clarksdale, a small town in the Mississippi Delta 150 miles from Jackson. There, he spent days at the Carnegie Public Library writing “The Sportswriter,” his 1986 novel about a failed fiction writer turned sportswriter whose son dies. (He followed it up with the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Independence Day” in 1995.) In the end, Mr. Ford wanted his marker at the library in Clarksdale, not his childhood home.
“The Delta is where I chose to live,” Mr. Ford said. “Carnegie Library is a refuge. They offered me a haven. I want to be remembered in a place where people could go read books. Literature can be a way for society to address what it doesn’t want to address.”
One of those issues is systemic racism, which persists in America despite the gains made in the 1960s. Mr. Ford, who now lives in Maine, said he recently taught a class in which students had neither read nor heard of “Black Boy,” Mr. Wright’s seminal work that painted a grim picture of race relations when it was published in 1945.
“I have no right to be surprised,” Mr. Ford said. “But that is a book people need to read so that historical anomalies will not be allowed to persist.” nyt
Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Miss., and lived in the same neighborhood as Eudora Welty. “It’s like sacred ground for Mississippi literature,” said Malcolm White, executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission.
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