UA Cason Award to Honor Winston Groom

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Winston Groom, renowned author of “Forrest Gump,” will receive the 2006 Clarence Cason Writing Award from the journalism department at The University of Alabama Thursday, March 16 at a banquet in his honor at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel.

Tickets for the banquet honoring Groom are $50 and include dinner. The event will begin with a 6 p.m. reception. Groom will accept the award and speak at the banquet.

Born in 1943, Groom grew up in Mobile. He graduated from UA in 1965, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army, and served in Vietnam. He then spent the next eight years working as a reporter and columnist for the Washington Star before becoming a full-time author.

“Forrest Gump” was on the New York Times bestseller list for 21 weeks, sold more than 2.5 million copies in the United States and was made into a blockbuster movie starring Tom Hanks. The book has also been reprinted in at least 13 countries. George Plimpton, late author, former editor of The Paris Review and good friend of Groom, wrote “Forrest Gump” is “a wacky and funny nuthouse of a book. May Gump’s tribes increase!”

In addition to “Forrest Gump,” Groom’s novels include “Gump & Co.,” “Better Times Than These,” “Gone the Sun,” “Only,” “Such a Pretty, Pretty Girl,” and the award-winning “As Summers Die,” which was made into a movie starring Bette Davis. He has also written “The Crimson Tide,” a pictorial history of football at The University of Alabama, which was published by The University of Alabama Press in the fall of 2000. He has recently finished a novel, “El Paso,” set in 1916.

Groom has written for numerous magazines, including Vanity Fair, Southern Living, Conde Nast Traveler, Newsweek, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine and contributed editorial articles to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The journalism department in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at UA established the Cason Award in 1997 to honor exemplary non-fiction over a long career.

All of the recipients have had strong connections to the state of Alabama.

To order tickets, call Sheila Davis at 205/348-4787. UA faculty and staff can purchase tickets to the Cason Banquet for $30.