Ford Madox Ford 1873–1939

Abstract

Ford Madox Ford, born Ford Hermann Hueffer, the son of Francis Hueffer, a Times music critic, and the grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, grew up in a Bohemian milieu, in London. Except for two years (1915–17) in the army in France and allowing for his complicated, emotional, often unhappy relations with women, his life was devoted to literature. He collaborated with Conrad, with whom he wrote the novels The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). He settled in Paris in 1922 and there set up and edited the Transatlantic Review which accepted work by Joyce and other modernist writers whom Ford did much to encourage. He wrote so copiously, and in so many genres, that his achievement as a novelist has been somewhat obscured, although his fellow-Catholic Graham Greene has helped to spread recognition of his work and especially of his masterpiece, the novel The Good Soldier (1915). His series of four novels, Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926) and Last Post (1928), is known as Parade’s End or ‘The Tietjens Tetralogy’.