“Forrest Gump”   summary.

If you say ‘Forrest Gump’ to people, most will think of the major film success of 1994. However, the novel Forrest Gump, on which the film is based, is extraordinary in its own right. It is a superbly imaginative retelling of the last forty years of American history.

The book is written in the first person; the reader feels that someone is telling them his life story. It narrates the adventures of Forrest Gump, an ‘idiot savant’. Forrest has a low IQ (intelligence), but is brilliant in certain areas, for example, mathematics. At school, children laugh at him. Only pretty Jenny Curran is kind to him. Then it is discovered that the boy is brilliant at running and football.
As a result, he gets into university.

By now it’s the late sixties. Forrest is drafted into the army and goes to fight in Vietnam. He leaves Vietnam a hero and is awarded a medal by President Nixon. This is only the beginning of many strange adventures. Forrest meets Jenny again; they become lovers for a short while. NASA, the space centre in Texas, sends Forrest into space with an ape called Sue! Back on the ground,
Forrest becomes a chess champion. He starts a shrimping business in Bayou. Then he hears that Jenny is married: ‘A part of me seemed to die when I heard it’. He drowns his sorrows in work and becomes a wealthy man.

Time passes. Forrest takes a holiday and by chance meets Jenny. She is indeed married but her child, called Forrest, is his. Forrest wants Jenny back but he realizes that it is better for his son ‘not to have an idiot for a father’. The story ends with Forrest giving all his money away to Jenny, his mother and friends. It’s time to start again.

The author.

The American Winston Groom, born in 1945, was brought up in the Deep South, in Mobile, on the Gulf of Mexico. His father was a lawyer and it was expected that Winston would follow in his footsteps. But at university, Winston realized he wanted to be a journalist and writer. In 1966 he was drafted into the army, and spent eleven months in Vietnam. Of this experience he says, ‘I did my job and got the hell out of there’. Groom then worked as a successful journalist but walked away from his job in order to write his first novel.

This was a book about Vietnam called “Better Times Than These”. Published in 1978, it was a critical and commercial success. Groom spent the next eight years in New York and during this time wrote several books, including “As Summers Die” (1980) and “Conversations with the Enemy”
(1984), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1986 the author returned to Alabama. He became inspired by a story his father had told him; it was about a retarded man who could only do one thing well, and that was play the piano. Groom wrote Forrest Gump in six weeks. ‘I had a few notes jotted down in the afternoon,
and by midnight the first chapter was finished,’ he says. The book got good reviews and sold well. Groom then met and married his wife Anne, who is twenty-three years younger than him - they share their bed with their large, lovable sheepdog, Forrest Gump.

“Forrest Gump” the film.

In 1994 the film “Forrest Gump” was released. A year later the book had sold 1.7 million copies. Hastily, Groom wrote “Gumpisms”: “The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump”.

This is a book of Forrest Gump’s sayings. In 1995, “Groom’s Shrouds of Glory” was published. This was followed by his sequel to Forrest Gump, “Gump & Co”. Now, says Groom, Forrest Gump is retired for good. “If you make it big with something”, he says, “they want you to write the same book over and over again ... I’m going to write what I damn well please. And when it stops being
fun, I’ll stop and practise law.”

“Forrest Gump” is one of the most successful films of all time. It was discussed on television and in newspapers all over the world. People wore T-shirts with Forrest Gump’s sayings: “Life is like a box of chocolates”; “Stupid is as stupid does”. The film won all the major Oscars at the 1994 Academy Awards in Hollywood.

The American film critic Roger Ebert described the film “Forrest Gump” as “a meditation on our times, as seen through the eyes of a man who lacks cynicism and takes things exactly as they are”. This is an apt description of both film and book.