Winston Groom, the novelist who wrote a rougher Forrest Gump than the one the world loved

Winston Groom

Photo: Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 23, 1943 Washington, D.C.
Died	2020-09
Occupation	Writer
Awards	Harper Lee Award

Every few years the story of how Forrest Gump lost money comes back, and this autumn it has. A blockbuster that filled cinemas around the world was booked by Paramount as a film in the red, and the man at the very end of the payment queue was the novelist who had invented Forrest in the first place. Winston Groom is usually remembered as a footnote to the film, the Alabama writer who sold the rights. That reading misses the more interesting fact about him: the Forrest Gump he wrote was a ruder, larger and stranger man than the one the world fell in love with.

In the book, Forrest is huge, foul-mouthed and a mathematical prodigy. He goes into space, becomes a professional wrestler and turns into a formidable chess player. Hollywood kept the football, the war and the shrimp, and sanded off almost everything else. Groom spent years defending both versions, and arguing with a studio over what his share of the second was worth.

Winston Francis Groom Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., on March 23, 1943, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where his father practiced law. He meant to follow him into the profession. At the University of Alabama he edited a campus literary magazine and changed his mind, graduating in 1965 with the idea of becoming a writer instead. The Army came first. He served with the Fourth Infantry Division and did a tour in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. The war marked his fiction and his nonfiction for good, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Back home, he became a reporter at the Washington Star, covering police and the courts. The Southern writer Willie Morris told him to try his luck in New York, and Groom took the advice, meeting, among others, his fellow Alabamian Truman Capote. He left journalism in 1976. His first novel, Better Times Than These (1978), followed a rifle company in Vietnam, and his friend P. J. O’Rourke called it the best novel written about that war. As Summers Die (1980), about a small-town Louisiana lawyer drawn into a fight over oil found on a Black sharecropping family’s land, won the Southern Library Association’s fiction award and became a television film. Conversations with the Enemy, written with Duncan Spencer about the prisoner of war Robert Garwood, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

In 1985 Groom moved back to Mobile. Years earlier his father had told him about a boy he had known as a child, and Groom turned that memory into Forrest Gump, writing it in about six weeks. It came out in 1986 to mostly kind reviews, though more than one critic found the characters and the plot thin. Don Noble, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alabama and a friend of Groom’s for 40 years, later put the case for it plainly: “‘Forrest Gump’ is really actually quite a fine novel. It’s more subtle and more complicated … richer than the movie.”

The film, adapted by Eric Roth, directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks, arrived in 1994 and won six Academy Awards, including best picture. It also changed Forrest. He lost his size (Groom had pictured John Goodman in the part), his profanity, his gift for numbers and most of his sex life. The filmmakers “took some of the rough edges off,” Groom told The New York Times that year. “They did an excellent job,” he told The Tuscaloosa News much later. “I would have probably preferred my version of it, but that thing never would have opened.” On the back of the film, the novel finally became a bestseller, selling 1.7 million copies.

The money was another matter. Groom had sold the rights for $350,000 plus 3 percent of the film’s net profit. In 1995 Paramount’s accounts showed a picture with $661 million in worldwide ticket sales as $62 million in the red, which left his percentage worth nothing. Hanks and Zemeckis, paid from the gross, counted as costs; Groom, Roth and the producer Steve Tisch waited behind them. Groom threatened to sue. The dispute ended that summer with a settlement and a seven-figure deal for the film rights to his sequel, Gump and Co., this time with a share of profits before expenses. “I’m happy as a pig in sunshine,” he told reporters. The sequel film was never made.

The years after the film were not his strongest as a novelist. He moved fast to cash in, with a book of Gump sayings, two cookbooks tied to the film and Gump and Co. itself, which carries Forrest from 1980 into the present day. His thriller Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl drew complaints that it leaned on the stock moves of the genre. Then he largely stopped writing fiction. His next novel, El Paso (2016), came almost two decades later.

What filled the gap was history. Groom became a popular narrative historian, writing Shrouds of Glory on the last great campaign of the Civil War, A Storm in Flanders on the Western Front, 1942: The Year That Tried Men’s Souls, Vicksburg, 1863, Kearny’s March, and group portraits such as The Aviators, The Generals and The Allies. Reviewers praised the novelist’s sense of character he brought to generals and campaigns. Alabama gave him the Harper Lee Award as its distinguished writer of the year in 2011, and he entered the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.

Groom died at 77 in September 2020 in the Fairhope area on Mobile Bay, while waiting for his last book, The Patriots, to be published. Governor Kay Ivey said Alabama had lost “one of our most gifted writers” and reminded people that he was also “a talented journalist & noted author of American history.” The novel is still the better place to meet him: a war veteran who gave his hero a dirtier mouth and a sharper mind than Hollywood allowed, and then watched the most famous ledger in film accounting say his idea had earned nothing.

Tags: writers, novelists, Tom Hanks, Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump, Winston Groom

Winston Groom, the novelist who wrote a rougher Forrest Gump than the one the world loved

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