The Sportswriter is a 1986 novel by Richard Ford, and the first of four books of fiction to feature the protagonist Frank Bascombe. In The Sportswriter, Bascombe is portrayed as a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes an existential crisis following the death of his son. The sequel to The Sportswriter is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day, published in 1995. After the third installment in the series, titled The Lay of the Land, was published in 2006, the three books together are sometimes identified as "The Bascombe Trilogy." Ford called them "The Bascombe Novels." In 2014, a fourth book in the series, titled , was published.