We had lunch in a restaurant downtown, and he started reminiscing about his child hood. He was a lawyer, born in 1906, living in Mobile. Both of those places were awful in the wintertime, so I went home to see my dad. I was living in Manhattan at the time, and I also had a house in the Hamptons. How did you come up with the idea for the book? On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the movie’s release, Groom, now seventy-six, reflects on the Gump phenomenon. Though he has long since moved on from Gump, Groom says that rarely a week goes by without someone reminding him about it. The movie changed his life (“I upgraded to a better brand of toilet paper,” he says), but Groom has continued to churn out high-quality books, mostly about history and American wars (he’s currently at work on book number twenty-three), writing in an office in his house in Point Clear, Alabama. The rising tide of the movie lifted Groom’s book to the top of the best-seller lists, and it eventually sold close to two million copies and spawned two best-selling spin-offs, Gumpisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump and Gump & Co. It became an immediate hit, both culturally and commercially, winning six Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and pulling in $678 million at the box office worldwide. Then came July 6, 1994, when the film version of Forrest Gump-directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, and Gary Sinise-was released nationwide. Forrest Gump, his funny-but-touching novel centered on a simpleminded man from Alabama, was another positive step in a budding literary career. He’d written three well-received novels ( Better Times Than These, As Summers Die, and Only) and a nonfiction book about a POW in Vietnam that became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He moved to New York City, where he haunted the literary scene, pal-ling around with the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, George Plimpton, and Joseph Heller. He’d worked in Washington, D.C., as a reporter for the Washington Star, covering the court system, and then quit that job to start writing books. After graduating from the University of Alabama, he had done a stint in the army and a tour in Vietnam. It was reviewed favorably by many literary critics and sold around 30,000 copies in hardcover.īy then, Groom was in his early forties and in the midst of creating a nice, steady writing career. Winston Groom recalls being pretty satisfied with his 1986 novel, Forrest Gump.
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