Forest game

Contents

Chapter 1
School and Football

Chapter 2
Life at University
4
Chapter 3
The Big Game
7
Chapter 4
Vietnam

Chapter 5
Danger in the Jungle

Chapter 6
The White House
Chapter 7
Meeting Jenny Again

Chapter 8
Into Space

Chapter 9
A Real Idiot

Chapter 10 Money for Playing Games

Chapter 11 The Shrimp Business

Chapter 12 Little Forrest

ActivitiesIntroduction

One day when Curtis had to change a wheel on the car, I helped him. ‘If you’re an idiot,’ he said angrily, ‘how do you know how to do that?’ ‘Maybe I am an idiot,’ I said, ‘but ‘I’m not stupid.’ I was born an idiot, but ‘I’m cleverer than most people think.

We quickly realize this is true in this wonderfully warm and funny story about Forrest Gump, a good-hearted young manfrom Alabama in the USA. He wins a medal for being very brave in the Vietnam war and meets the President of the United States of America. He becomes a footballer, a film star, a businessman and he goes into space. And his best friend is an ape called Sue!

Forrest Gump is now a film, with Tom Hanks and Sally Field in it.
Tom Hanks won an Oscar for the film in 1994. In its first eighteen days,the film of Forrest Gump took $100 million in American cinemas — more than any other film that Paramount Pictures has made before. Forrest Gump is an unusual man who does a lot of unusual things. Millions of ordinary Americans liked the film. They felt Forrest Gump’s story was also partly a story about themselves and about America from the 1960s to today. Forrest Gump lived the ‘American Dream’. Itdoesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, you can be anything you want to be.

Winston Groom’s other books are Better Times Than These, about the war in Vietnam, and As Summers Die. He lives for some of the time in New York City and for the rest of the time in Clear Point, Alabama.

Chapter 1 School and Football

I was born an idiot─ but I’m cleverer than people think. I canth ink things OK,but when I have to say them or write them down, sometimes they come out all wrong. When I was born, my Mom named me Forrest. My daddy died just after I was born. He worked on the ships. One day a big box of bananas fell down on my daddy and killed him. I don’t like bananas much. Only banana cake. I like that all right.

At first when I was growing up, I played with everybody. But then some boyshit me, and my Mom didn’t want me to play with them again. I tried to play with girls, but they all ran away from me.

I went to an ordinary school for a year. Then the children started laughing and running away from me. But one girl, Jenny Curran, didn’t run away, and sometimes she walked home with me. She was nice.

Then they put me into another kind of school, and there were some strangeboys there. Some couldn’t eat or go to the toilet without help. I stayed in that school for five or six years. But when I was thirteen, I grew six inches in six months! And by the time I was sixteen, I was bigger and heavier than all the other boys in the school.

One day I was walking home, and a car stopped next to me. The driver asked me my name, and I told him. ‘What school do you go to?’ heasked. I told him about the idiot school. ‘Do you ever play football?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I see other people playing, but I don’t play and they never ask me to play with them.’ ‘OK,’ the man said.
Three days later, the man in the car came and got me out of

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Then he threw some milk at me, and I jumped out of my chair and ran away.
So she phoned Jenny’s Mom and explained. Nextevening, Jenny arrived at our house, wearing a white dress, and with a pink flower in her hair. She was the prettiest thing that I ever saw.

The cinema was not far from our house. Jenny got the tickets, and we went inside. The film was about a man and a woman, Bonnie and Clyde, and there was a lot of shooting and killing. Well, I laughed a lot. But when I did this, people looked at me, and...