Author
Ford Madox Ford
1873-1939
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor, remembered for The Good Soldier and for literary journals that championed the new writers of his day.
Born Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer.
Ford Madox Ford was born Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer on 17 December 1873 in Merton, Surrey. His father, Francis Hueffer, was German and became a music critic for The Times. His mother, Catherine, was English, and he was named after her father, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. He attended University College School in London but never studied at university.
In 1894 he eloped with Elsie Martindale, and at Winchelsea their neighbours included Joseph Conrad, with whom he wrote three novels. In 1908 he founded The English Review, which published Thomas Hardy and Henry James alongside early work by Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence. In 1915, at 41, he enlisted in the Welsh Regiment and was sent to France. In 1919 he changed his name from Hueffer to Ford, partly, he said, "because a Teutonic name is in these days disagreeable". In 1924 he founded The Transatlantic Review and, living in Paris, published James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.
The Good Soldier (1915), set just before the First World War, follows two couples living abroad, one British and one American, through intricate flashbacks. Ford reported that a friend called it "the finest French novel in the English language!" His novel Some Do Not... is also on this site. His combat experiences inspired his Parade's End novels (1924-1928).
Ford spent his last years teaching at Olivet College in Michigan, and died in Deauville, France, in June 1939, aged 65. The Good Soldier is often named among the great novels of the 20th century.
Sources: wikipedia.org
