Ford
Madox Ford
born Dec. 17, 1873, Merton,
Surrey, Eng.
died June 26, 1939, Deauville, Fr.
English novelist, editor, and critic, an
international influence in early
20th-century literature.
The son of a German music critic, Francis
Hueffer, and a grandson of Ford Madox Brown,
one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Ford
grew up in a cultured, artistic environment.
At 18 he wrote his first novel, The Shifting
of Fire (1892). His acquaintance with Joseph
Conrad in 1897 led to their collaboration in
The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). In
1908 he founded the English Review,
publishing pieces by the foremost
contemporary British authors and also by the
then-unknown D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis,
Ezra Pound, and H.M. Tomlinson. At the same
time, Ford produced works of his own: a
trilogy of historical novels about the
ill-fated Catherine Howard and novels of
contemporary life in which he experimented
with technique and style. It was not until
The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many
to be his best work, that he matched an
assured, controlled technique with powerful
content. This work skillfully reveals the
destructive effects of contradictory sexual
and religious impulses upon a quartet of
upper-middle-class characters.
Ford took part in World War I, in which
he was gassed and shell-shocked. Afterward
he changed his name from Hueffer to Ford and
tried farming in Sussex and Left Bank life
in Paris. While in Paris he edited the
Transatlantic Review (January 1924–January
1925), which published works by James Joyce
and Ernest Hemingway.
In his long literary career Ford had
fruitful contacts with most of the important
writers of the day and is remembered for his
generous encouragement of younger writers.
Of more than 70 published works, those on
which his reputation rests are The Good
Soldier and the tetralogy Parade’s End
(1950; comprising Some Do Not [1924], No
More Parades [1925], A Man Could Stand Up
[1926], and Last Post [1928]). During his
last years, which he spent in France and the
United States, Ford produced important works
of criticism, reminiscences, and a major
novel, The Rash Act (1933), in which he
continued his lifelong exploration of
questions of identity and inheritance.
