In ORourkes view, Grooms debut novel, ∛etter Times Than These (1978), was the best novel written about the Vietnam War. ORourke, the political satirist and journalist who knew Groom for decades, wrote in an email. ∟orrest Gump is not the only reason to celebrate him as a great writer, P.J. In addition to his stepson, he is survived by his wife, Susan Groom a daughter, Carolina Groom and two other stepchildren, Guy Helmsing and Margaret Browning. Like his father, he would return to Alabama to live. At 6 feet 6 inches, brimming with charisma and wild stories, Groom fit the part imposingly. He palled around with writers like Irwin Shaw, Joseph Heller and Willie Morris, hewing to the tradition of the Southern raconteur and man of letters. On his discharge he spent nearly a decade as a reporter for the now-closed Washington Star before quitting to pursue a literary career in New York. I mean, its something that was very impressed on me. Id never done anything worth a hoot in my life except that, Groom said in a C-SPAN interview, referring to his military experience. War was a formative experience and one that would find its way into much of his writing. His mother taught English in school and inspired Winstons love of literature.Īfter attending the University of Alabama, where he edited humor and literary magazines, Groom joined the Army in 1965 as a second lieutenant in the infantry and was shipped out to Vietnam the following year. His father was a lawyer for the Pentagon who returned to Mobile, Alabama, to practice law. was born March 23, 1943, in Washington, the only child of Winston Sr. Where were you eight years ago? he told The Times in a 1994 profile. ∿orrest Gumps belated commercial success left him both delighted and bemused.
The publicity made Grooms novel a bestseller long after the fact, and it prompted him to write a sequel, Gump & Co., published the next year. The film grossed more than $670 million globally at the box office, earned 13 Academy Award nominations and won six Oscars, including for best picture. The movies popularity even led to the founding of a national seafood restaurant chain, Bubba Gump Shrimp, inspired by a character who hopes to start a shrimping business. His koanlike sayings stupid is as stupid does and the line about chocolates (neither of which appeared as such in the novel) entered the lexicon as Gumpisms. Forrest Gump became, like Huck Finn and Atticus Finch, to name two other fictional Southerners, a beloved American character. Novelist and critic Jonathan Baumbach described it in The New York Times Book Review as a kind of defanged ∜andide, an unabrasive satire of the idiocy of life in our time.īut when Gump was made into a film by Paramount Pictures, it became a cultural phenomenon. The novel sold respectably and earned good reviews. ∿orrest Gump tells the picaresque adventures of an Alabama man who stumbles through contemporary American history with an IQ of 70 and a headful of folksy wisdom. Groom had published three well-regarded novels and was a nonfiction finalist for a Pulitzer Prize when he wrote the book that would define him as a writer and turn the Gumpian phrase life is like a box of chocolates into a modern-day proverb. He died in his sleep, most likely from a heart attack, his stepson Frederick Helmsing said. Winston Groom, a Southern writer who found a measure of belated celebrity when his 1986 novel, ∿orrest Gump, was made into the 1994 Oscar-winning film starring Tom Hanks, died Thursday at his home in Fairhope, Alabama.
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