Gump and Co. 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, but more similar to
Forrest Gump of the 1960s. Thomas Byers, in a "Modern Fiction Studies" article, called the film "an aggressively conservative film". It has been noted that while Gump follows a very conservative lifestyle, Jenny's life is full of countercultural embrace, complete with drug usage, promiscuity, and antiwar rallies, and that their eventual marriage might be a kind of reconciliation. Jennifer Hyland Wang argued in a "Cinema Journal" article that Jenny's death to an unnamed virus "...symbolizes the death of liberal America and the death of the protests that defined a decade [1960s]." She also notes the film's screenwriter, Eric Roth, when developing the