Forrest Gump Books in Order

The Forrest Gump books are built around one voice, a towering, good natured Alabamian who tells you his life story in his own crooked grammar, letting you watch him blunder into fame while he insists he is not very smart.

In the first novel, Forrest Gump, that life starts in small town Alabama and stretches across three decades of American history. Forrest becomes a star football player at the University of Alabama, serves in Vietnam, gets swept up in space flight, celebrity, and shrimping, and never stops circling back to his childhood friend and love, Jenny.(en.wikipedia.org)

Readers meet him as he sees himself: huge, straightforward, often baffled by the people in charge. The humor comes from the gap between his simple explanations and the wild events around him, but there is a steady thread of loyalty, loneliness, and stubborn decency running underneath.

Gump & Co. picks up after the end of the first book and carries Forrest into the 1980s. He loses his shrimp fortune, tries his hand at pro football and odd jobs, raises his son, and keeps tripping over real headlines, from corporate fads to political scandals, without entirely understanding why history keeps calling his name.(en.wikipedia.org)

Around those two novels sit lighter companions. Gumpisms gathers Forrest's offbeat bits of advice in a small gift volume, while The Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Cookbook uses his world as a frame for a collection of shrimp dishes and Southern style comfort food, keeping the character alive in the kitchen as well as on the page.(penguin.co.uk)

Taken together, the series reads like a tall tale told on a front porch, one eye on the evening news and one eye on the person sitting beside you.

Readers who come to Forrest Gump from the film will find familiar scenes but also surprise detours, rougher edges, and stranger adventures that never made it to the screen. Starting with the original novel and then moving into Gump & Co. gives you the fullest sense of how Groom imagined his most famous character growing older in a country that keeps reinventing itself.(en.wikipedia.org)