NEW YORK • American writer Winston Groom, who found a measure of belated celebrity when his 1986 novel, Forrest Gump, was made into the 1994 Oscar-winning film starring Tom Hanks, died last Thursday at his home in Fairhope, Alabama. He was 77.
He died in his sleep, most likely from a heart attack, his stepson Frederick Helmsing said.
Groom had published three well-regarded novels and was a Pulitzer Prize non-fiction finalist. But it was Forrest Gump that would define him as a writer and turn the Gumpian phrase "life is like a box of chocolates" into a modern-day proverb.
The novel 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. The novel sold respectably and earned good reviews.
But when Forrest Gump was made into a film by Paramount Pictures, it became a cultural phenomenon. Forrest Gump became, like Huckleberry Finn and Atticus Finch, to name two other fictional American Southerners, a beloved American character.
His koan-like 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". The movie's popularity even led to the founding of an American seafood restaurant chain, Bubba Gump Shrimp, inspired by a character who hopes to start a shrimping business.
The 1994 film grossed more than US$670 million globally at the box office, earned 13 Academy Award nominations and won six Oscars, including for Best Picture.
The publicity made Groom's novel a bestseller long after the fact, and it prompted him to write a sequel, Gump & Co., published in 1995.
Groom was married three times. 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.
"Forrest Gump is not the only reason to celebrate him as a great writer," P.J. O'Rourke, the political satirist and journalist who knew Groom for decades, wrote in an e-mail.
In Mr O'Rourke's view, Groom's debut novel, Better Times Than These (1978), "was the best novel written about the Vietnam War".
"And this is not even to mention Winston's extraordinary historical and non-fiction works," he added.
Those books include the Pulitzer Prize finalist (for general non-fiction), Conversations With The Enemy (1983), an account of a Vietnam-era prisoner of war written with Duncan Spencer; Shrouds Of Glory (1995), about the United States Civil War; and Patriotic Fire (2006), about the Battle of New Orleans.
NYTIMES
