Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), English novelist and critic, born in Merton, Devon, and educated in England, Germany, and France. He changed his original surname, Hueffer, in 1919, after having served with the British Army in World War I. Ford was a grandson of the English painter Ford Madox Brown. Before the war he had been an associate of the expatriate writers Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and with Conrad wrote the novels The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903).

The work of a superb stylist of the English language, Ford's own novel The Good Soldier (1915) is considered his masterpiece. The story of two married couples, it probes concealed passions with carefully controlled shifts of viewpoint and time. He employed this narrative technique again in a tetralogy of novels about English life before and during the war: Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and The Last Post (1928); they were republished in one volume, Parade's End, in 1950. His more than 80 works include a collection of poetry, critical studies, and memoirs. As founder of the English Review (1908) and editor of the Transatlantic Review (1924), Ford was responsible for launching and encouraging many gifted contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. From 1927 on Ford lived in the United States and in France.