Ford Madox Ford(1873–1939)

Ford Hermann Hueffer, who took the name Ford Madox Ford in 1919, was born at Merton in Surrey on 17 December 1873, the grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. He grew up inside the post-Pre-Raphaelite extended family, the Rossettis and Holman Hunt and Burne-Jones moving through the rooms of his childhood, and published his first novel at nineteen.

He met Joseph Conrad in 1898 and the two were close neighbours and collaborators on the Romney Marsh for a decade. They wrote three novels together, The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903) and The Nature of a Crime. The partnership was the longest sustained working collaboration of Conrad's career and Ford's true apprenticeship: Ford taught Conrad how the English sentence sat together, and Conrad taught Ford how to write a novel under technical scrutiny.

He founded the English Review at his own flat in December 1908. In its first twelve months it ran Hardy, Henry James, Wells, Galsworthy and Conrad at the front and discovered the new generation at the back: the November 1909 issue carried D. H. Lawrence's first published work, and the magazine printed the first English-language appearances of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Norman Douglas. For that year Ford was the editor of the most consequential English literary magazine of the early twentieth century.

He served as a junior officer on the Western Front from 1916, and the war underwrote his masterwork. The Good Soldier, published in 1915, became the modernist novel his reputation rests on, and the Parade's End tetralogy, Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up and The Last Post, written across the 1920s, was the major post-war achievement. He changed his surname to Ford in 1919.

In Paris he founded and edited the Transatlantic Review in 1924, which in its single year published Ernest Hemingway's first stories, James Joyce's early Work in Progress, Gertrude Stein and E. E. Cummings. He spent the 1930s between Paris, Provence and a writer-in-residence post in Michigan, and died at Deauville on 26 June 1939. The Ford name, the locative ford behind half of England's market towns, was fixed on him by the 1919 change, and through him on the Conrad-edited, Lawrence-discovered, Hemingway-published continuity of literary modernism.