Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life

The second volume of Max Saunders's magisterial biography of Ford Madox Ford takes up the story from Ford's enlistment in the army and departure for France in 1916. Like its predecessor, The After-War World makes full use of previously unpublished and long-lost material. It is the first biography to establish Ford's importance to modern literature: exploring the relations between a writer's life, autobiography, and fiction, and showing how Ford's case challenges the conventions of literary biography itself. Saunders provides a ground-breaking reading of Ford's post-war masterpiece, Parade's End, and describes the founding of the transatlantic review, the influential literary journal that published Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Picasso, and many more major writers and artists. Ford's personal relationships were no less complex than his work: while living with Stella Bowen after the breakup of his partnership with Violet Hunt he had a brief affair with Jean Rhys, but he was to spend his final years until his death in 1939, with the Polish American painter Janice Biala. Throughout his career Ford endlessly reinvented himself, and this biography, for the first time, offers a sustained and critical account of his dazzling literary transformations.