About the Author

Winston Groom wrote the acclaimed Vietnam War novel Better Times Than These, the prize-winning As Summers Die, and co-authored Conversations with the Enemy, which was nominated for a 1984 Pulitzer Prize. He was also the author of the No.1 New York Times bestsellers Forrest Gump and Gumpisms- The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump.

Winston Groom lived in New York City and Point Clear, Alabama. He died in September 2020.

Reviews

Forrest Gump is line bred out of Voltaire and Huck Finn; its humour is wild and coarse, a satire right on the money. It is not the less honest for being so funny, for bringing the woebegone archangels of our culture and history to judgement. Anyone who doesn't read this book deserves to spend the winter in North Dakota
*Jim Harrison*

A superbly controlled satire
*The Washington Post*

Rollicking, bawdy... A good time... Poking fun at everything
*People*

Winston Groom has created the ideal citizen for the modern world - a perfect idiot
*P.J. O'Rourke*

Joyously madcap
*Publishers Weekly*

Forrest Gump is line bred out of Voltaire and Huck Finn; its humour is wild and coarse, a satire right on the money. It is not the less honest for being so funny, for bringing the woebegone archangels of our culture and history to judgement. Anyone who doesn't read this book deserves to spend the winter in North Dakota -- Jim Harrison
A superbly controlled satire * The Washington Post *
Rollicking, bawdy... A good time... Poking fun at everything * People *
Winston Groom has created the ideal citizen for the modern world - a perfect idiot -- P.J. O'Rourke
Joyously madcap * Publishers Weekly *

There is a joyously madcap feeling to the first half of this unusual novel, but then the absurdity gathers its own speed and begins to run dangerously amok. Groom's picaresque tale is told by an idiot, the Gump of the title, and follows his outrageous life from early stardom for Bear Bryant's Crimson Tide, through a tour in Vietnam and across the broad canvas of America during the '70s and '80s. Like most literary idiots, Forrest Gump is a lot smarter than the people he encounters. He is also no ordinary idiot. Instead, he is a mathematical idiot savant, capable of outperforming NASA's on-board computers, which is why Gump ends up on a space mission with an ape and the first woman astronauta mission that ends in the forests of New Guinea where Gump meets a Yale-tutored cannibal. All this takes place after Gump has met Lyndon Johnson and saved Chairman Mao from drowning, which is to say that this is a very broad satire. While there is much on-target humor here, Groom, author of Better Times Than These, has written better books than this. (March 7)