Author of Forrest Gump Writes Book About El Paso and Pancho Villa

Everyone knows the classic Tom Hanks film, Forrest Gump, but not as many know it was a novel 10 years before it was a movie. (Or that there was a really terrible sequel that was never turned into a movie, thank goodness.)

Anyway, the guy who wrote the novel, Winston Groom, is finally back at fiction, and he's chosen El Paso as the setting of his new novel, entitled -- wait for it -- El Paso. And according to NPR, it's kind of a Gump-like story where the characters interact with historical figures.

Groom had financial squabbles with the makers of the Gump movie, so he almost deliberately made the sequel unfilmable so Hollywood would go away. Groom turned to writing mostly non-fiction stories and avoided fiction until he came across an interesting legend about Pancho Villa:

...(Groom) says a friend, Eddie Morgan (a distant relative of the late J.P. Morgan), used to talk about his family's million-acre cattle ranch in northern Mexico, and how Pancho Villa attacked it in 1916. Groom says Villa had the ranch manager sabered to death and then kidnapped his children.  "It just occurred to me that I could make something of this," Groom says. And he did: Groom's first work of fiction in almost 20 years is a sprawling, 400-plus-page novel called El Paso. It takes place during the Mexican Revolution and follows a railroad tycoon on a manhunt across the High Sierras to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren from Pancho Villa. -- NPR

The book is a work of fiction, though Groom is leaning on historical facts. However, Groom said he's more interested in entertaining people than being a history professor. So, there's that. Could be pretty cool.

Anyway, if you're more interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff on why Gump 2 never got made, here ya go: