Ford retired from writing fiction and became a writer for Inside Sports magazine. When the magazine folded he went back to fiction and wrote The Sportswriter. It was named one of Time magazine’s best five books of 1986 and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulker Award for Fiction. He authored Wildlife in 1990 and Independence Day in 1995. For Independence Day Ford won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Ford authored The Lay of the Land in 2006, Canada in 2012, and Let Me Be Frank With You in 2014. He has also published the story collections Rock Springs, Women with Men: Three Stories, A Multitude of Sins, and Vintage Ford. He was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Media for Excellence in Fiction for Canada and the Prix Femina Etranger for Canada in 2013.