Groom’s father was a lawyer at the Pentagon during World War II. His nonfiction book, Conversations with the Enemy: The Story of PFC Robert Garwood, was a nonfiction finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Groom’s Forrest Gump and its sequel, Gump & Co.īy the time he wrote Forrest Gump, Groom had already published three well-regarded novels - Better Times Than These, As Summers Die, and Only. In a 1994 interview with the Times, Groom said, “It’s almost like the lizard part of my brain went into gear and bypassed the brain up here.” He pointed to his forehead. And I remember Joe Heller telling me Catch-22 wrote itself. He said his friend Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22 - the acclaimed satirical novel about a cowardly American bombardier and his fictional squadron in World War II - told him he’d written his dense, irreverent narrative in just six weeks, which seemed impossible to Groom. Groom wrote the book’s first chapter that night, and the work poured out of him from that moment forward. “I started making notes, and that same night at some point, I had the character Forrest Gump,” he said. At about the same time, he saw a 60 Minutes segment about idiot savants.

In a 2014 interview with C-SPAN, Groom said his beloved character - now an iconic figure in American culture - was born from a conversation over lunch with his father, who described a childhood memory of an intellectually disabled young boy who could play the piano beautifully. Groom’s stepson, Frederick Helmsing, told the New York Times that a heart attack was the likely cause of death. Winston Groom, the Vietnam veteran and Southern writer best known for his 1986 novel Forrest Gump, which became the beloved 1994 film starring Tom Hanks, died in his sleep Thursday at his home in Fairhope, Alabama.

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