'I want them to go away saying, 'That's a hell of a good story. As the characters in the novel crisscross the desert of northern Mexico, they encounter a grizzly bear and witness a bloody bullfight as well as the great monarch butterfly migration.Ībove all else, Groom says, he wants to entertain his readers.

'Blood will happen.'Ī lot else also happens. 'The kind of viciousness and bloodshed you see in El Paso is true to this time and to the kind of conflict that you see playing out when the revolutionary meets the capitalist,' Giraldi says. Groom has filled in history's blank spaces with fiction, but William Giraldi, who writes about literature for The New Republic, says nothing in the novel seems phony. (Bierce actually did go to Mexico in search of Villa, and was never heard from again.) 'If a man is born under the wrong star,' said Pancho Villa, 'it will shine upon his ass always - even while he is seated.'īierce was pondering this when Villa stuck the derringer between Bierce's eyes and pulled the trigger. So I was thinking, after the commercial success of Forrest Gump, that I didn't really have any ideas that really grabbed me.' 'I think that every novelist of the kind of novels that I write has in them maybe one really good book,' Groom says, 'but the trouble with so many novelists is that they keep on writing novels even when they run out of ideas. And that's when Groom took a break from writing fiction. Eight years after Forrest Gump was published, its Oscar-winning film adaptation (starring Tom Hanks) turned it into a best-seller. The novel follows an intellectually-disabled, kind-hearted man who is witness to big events in American history. Groom wrote two more books about Vietnam before he started the story that would make him famous: Forrest Gump. And I wrote my first book, called Better Times Than These, and it did well and I was off and running.' Let's see if I can make some sense of it. And I thought, Well, at least I've done this.

'Any experience like that, I mean, it's like being in a year-long car wreck,' he says. How?īefore he served in Vietnam, author Winston Groom says he wanted to write but didn't have anything to write about. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title El Paso Author Winston Groom

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