Winston Groom, known by most due to Forrest Gump, died yesterday at age 77.
Groom was born in Washington D. C. in 1943 and raised in Mobile Alabama. His original ambition was to have been a lawyer, like his father, but he switched to writing while in university. Graduating in 1965, he entered the Army as an officer due to having been in ROTC and served a tour of duty in Vietnam with the 4th Infantry Division. After leaving the service he worked as a newspaper reporter before quitting to write novels, with his first novel being Better Times Than These, about riflemen in Vietnam. He returned to Mobile in 1985 and write from there. A novel released in 2016 was his first in twenty years. In between he wrote works of history, ultimately writing more of those than he did works of fiction.
He'll always be remembered for Forrest Gump, his fourth novel, with the title character being the subject of a sequel written after the famous move was released. While Groom was a Southerner not all of his novels were set in the South. Having said that, Forrest Gump was and it fits sort of uniquely, in my view, on the edge of the Southern Gothic literary genre.
