The Good Soldier (by Ford Madox Ford)

Ford, Ford Madox - 1873–1939, English author; grandson of Ford Madox Brown. He changed his name legally from Ford Madox Hueffer in 1919. The author of over 60 works including novels, poems, criticism, travel essays, and reminiscences, Ford also edited the English Review (1908–11) and the Transatlantic Review (1924, Paris); among his contributors were Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence. Ford's most important fictional works are The Good Soldier (1915), a subtle and complex novel about the relationship of two married couples, and a tetralogy (1924–28): Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post (pub. together as Parade's End, 1950). These works reveal the collapse of the Tory-Christian virtues under the violence and social hypocrisy that culminated in World War I. Ford collaborated with Joseph Conrad on The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and other works. His memoir of Conrad (1924) discusses the narrative techniques that the two writers evolved. Toward the end of his life, Ford lived in France and the United States and was a member of the faculty of Olivet College in Michigan.

See his letters (ed. by R. M. Ludwig, 1965); biographies by F. MacShane (1965) and A. Mizener (1971, repr. 1985); studies by F. MacShane, ed. (1972), S. Stand, ed. (1981), A. B. Snitow (1984), and R. A. Cassell, ed. (1987).

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