Ford Madox Ford

Born Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer on December 17, 1873, in Merton, Surrey, Ford Madox Ford grew up steeped in the arts: his father, Francis Hueffer, was a German-born music critic for The Times, and his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, one of the founding Pre-Raphaelite painters. He published his first book, a fairy tale called The Brown Owl, at seventeen. In 1898 he met Joseph Conrad, and the two embarked on a turbulent literary partnership that produced two collaborative novels and left Ford permanently under the older writer’s shadow. In 1908 Ford founded The English Review, one of the most important literary magazines of the century, publishing Thomas Hardy, Henry James, H. G. Wells, and, in his first significant appearance, D. H. Lawrence. He changed his name from Hueffer to Ford after the First World War, partly to shed his German surname in a climate of anti-German feeling, partly to honor his grandfather. The Good Soldier (1915), a devastating study of adultery and self-deception among the English and American leisured classes narrated by the most unreliable of narrators, is regarded as one of the finest novels in the English language. After the war, during which he served in the trenches and suffered shell shock, he moved to Paris and founded The Transatlantic Review, which published Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. Parade’s End (1924–1928), a tetralogy tracking an English gentleman through the destruction of the old social order by the Great War, is his other masterpiece. He was a tireless champion of other writers’ work, often at the expense of his own reputation. He died on June 26, 1939, in Deauville, France, at the age of sixty-five.