Ford, Ford Madox

Ford Madox Ford, original name Ford Hermann Hueffer, also called Ford Madox Hueffer, (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.