Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was born on December 17, 1873, in Merton, United Kingdom. His real name was Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer. His grandfather was the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, after whom he would adopt the literary name. The author of The Good Soldier grew up in a cultural and artistic environment and, at the age of 18, wrote his first book, The Shifting of the Fire, and then collaborated with Joseph Conrad in the writing of three novels (The Heirs, 1901, Romance, 1903, and The Nature of a Crime, 1909). His best-known work would be The Good Soldier, which narrates the intersecting tragedy of two "perfect couples", using various innovative literary techniques. In 1908, he founded The English Review, where he published texts by some well-known British authors, but also by unknown ones such as D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound. Between 1924 and 1928, he wrote the tetralogy Parade's End, about English life before and after the war, using his experiences at the front as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. In the 1920s, Ford Madox Ford launched a new publication, The Transatlantic Review, having lived for a time in the Parisian district of Montparnasse, where he would establish friendly relations with writers he would later publish, such as James Joyce, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Jean Rhys (with whom he lived). During a later stay in the USA, he was in a relationship with Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell. Ford Madox Ford died in Deauville, France, on June 26, 1939.