Best-selling author Jamie Ford was in Highland Park on Thursday, the keynote speaker at the town's literary festival.

Earlier that day, he stopped by Highland Park High School, in one of the wealthiest school districts in the state, where he spoke to an assembly of freshmen and sophomores.

It did not go well.

On his personal website, Ford — who broke onto the literary scene in 2009 with his debut, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet — chronicled how he was mocked by a group of students during his talk, "a thousand students, trolling me," as teachers and a principal looked on.

"After visiting more than 100 schools, from inner-city schools in New York, the kind with clear backpacks and metal detectors, to elite international baccalaureate high schools, including one where the previous year's guest speaker was Justin Bieber — I've finally had a school visit ... go sideways," Ford wrote. "I'm looking at you, Highland Park High School, and I'm confused."

About halfway through the 50-minute talk, when Ford started a Q&A session, students began to interrupt with random cascades of clapping and cheering, so loud he struggled to talk over them.

Jamie Ford, author of "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet." ((The Associated Press))

While the teenagers had been predictably rowdy during his opening remarks, with a few students escorted out of the auditorium by teachers, their behavior deteriorated to the point where Ford was forced to quickly blurt out responses to questions.

"Despite the 1000 to 1 odds, I wasn't about to be run off the stage by a bunch [of] entitled children who had decided I was just another mark to be bullied," he wrote.

At the end of his talk, Ford — who is Chinese-American, and whose great-grandfather emigrated from China and worked in Nevada's borax mines — fielded his final question, about Japanese internment during World War II. Ford's debut novel is set during that time period.

From Ford's website:

"I managed to end my talk on a bittersweet note about the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans and nationals, about how if we forget that bit of history, we are diminished as a people.

I got my point across and in that brief moment your impoliteness was forgiven and all was well. I thanked you, for not clapping and cheering the Japanese Internment.

"Then you clapped and cheered the Japanese Internment.

"You couldn't resist.

"That showed me more about you than I wanted to know.

"But there it is, your applause still ringing in my ears."

Ford wrote that he couldn't help but draw a comparison to a Highland Park High graduate who made national headlines in 2015 for all the wrong reasons. Levi Pettit was videotaped with University of Oklahoma fraternity brothers leading a racist cheer that included the N-word.

"In coming to Highland Park High School, I thought that was an anomaly by an immature alum, a racially insensitive apple in a barrel of healthy fruit," Ford wrote. "But now I'm not so sure."

In a statement late Saturday, Highland Park ISD said: "Unfortunately, the behavior of some of our students during this year's keynote presentation was not at the standard that we expect. We value the current and past authors who make this event possible, and we will work with our students to improve as a result of this experience."

Ford, via a phone interview from a Minneapolis airport on Saturday, praised the organizers of Highland Park's literary festival and said the teachers and students he talked with were kind and considerate. In fact, he returned to the high school the following day to run fiction-writing workshops for three classes.

He plans to come back to the Dallas area later this year, to promote his third work of historical fiction, which is set to publish in September.

"I'm not going to generalize the state, or generalize the kids at Highland Park, for that matter," he said. "But a mob is a mob; it speaks with its own language."