Gump and Co. humor tiresome and banal. Gump and Co. Gump & Co. (or Forrest Gump and Co.) is a 1995 novel by Winston Groom. It is the sequel to his novel "Forrest Gump" (1986), and the Academy Award-winning film of the same name released in 1994, with Tom Hanks. It was written to chronicle Forrest's life throughout the 1980s. On the first page, Forrest Gump tells readers "Don't never let nobody make a movie of your life's story," though "Whether they get it right or wrong, it don't matter." However, the character is not an idiot savant, as in the first book,
Forrest Gump New York Times" reviewer Janet Maslin called Gump a "hollow man" who is "self-congratulatory in his blissful ignorance, warmly embraced as the embodiment of absolutely nothing." Marc Vincenti of "Palo Alto Weekly" called the character "a pitiful stooge taking the pie of life in the face, thoughtfully licking his fingers." Bruce Kawin and Gerald Mast's textbook on film history notes that Forrest Gump's dimness was a metaphor for glamorized nostalgia in that he represented a blank slate by which the Baby Boomer generation projected their memories of those events. The film is commonly seen as a polarizing one for audiences,