Born Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer, grandson to one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, the writer known as Ford Madox Ford grew up in a cultured, artistic household in Surrey, England. He eloped with his school girlfriend, Elsie Martindale in 1894 and moved to London, but their happiness only lasted ten years because, in 1904, Ford suffered a nervous breakdown and had to retreat to his Father’s native land, Germany. Ford left his wife in 1909 after his return to London but found great literary success. He published many books in a short amount of time, including his most famous trilogy, The Fifth Queen, which tells the story of Katherine Howard. He also founded The English Review in 1908. The English Review would go on to shape English and American literature by curating a space for new and emerging authors to publish their works. Ford was renowned as a literary critic and revolutionary with his incorporation of an unreliable narrator in his novel The Good Soldier, published in 1915, who tells his story through flashbacks. 
Ford enrolled in the British Army in 1915 and left shell shocked and wounded. He published a collection of poems written during his time in the war in 1918 called On Heaven, and Poems Written on Active Service, and would later write his tetralogy, Parade’s End, from 1924-1928. Parade’s End is widely considered one of the prominent works to come out of World War I, and covered the life of a British soldier before, during, and after the war. 
In an attempt to readjust to life, he tried farming in Sussex but ultimately left England for Paris in 1923 where, with the help of Ezra Pound, published The Transatlantic Review which would publish the works of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemmingway among others. He traveled the rest of his life, giving lectures in America and England, and died in Deauville, France in 1939. By the time of his death, Ford had published almost 80 books spanning multiple genres, some of which changed the trajectory of modern literature. 
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