Provence

“As human beings recklessly use up the world’s resources and despoil the planet, as the folly of globalisation becomes more apparent, as we head towards what could be the biggest smash of all, the wisdom and the way of living that Ford Madox Ford – literature’s good soldier – found in Provence are perhaps even more worth attending to.” — Julian Barnes, The Guardian

“To me, Ford is one of those prodigious writing engines, like Trollope or Wodehouse, who published so much that he seems inexhaustible. His nonfiction glories in being quirky and self-indulgent, while remaining great fun as well as insightful, even prescient.” — Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books

“[Provence] blends autobiography, history, polemic and daydream, as Ford evokes a kind of Utopia under the sun… Provence is one of the great 20th-century celebrations of place.” — The Washington Post

“The expansiveness and exuberance of spirit, the embracing knowledge of the place, that show forth in Ford’s long love affair with Provence will always give this book a joyous life of its own.” —Eudora Welty

“A fine writer, with traces of a most engaging charlatan…. As in his fiction he writes out of a kind of hilarious depression. The world of today, with its Northern barbarians and its cellophaned foods, is a foul place, but there is always memory—and the book becomes an elaborate pattern of memories, historical and personal, called up not only by Provence, the province, but Provence, the idea…. And the subject, I suppose, is just the good life—as it should be lived by the world.” —Graham Greene

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was a prolific novelist and critic. Also an influential editor, he created the literary journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, in whose pages he published work by authors such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and many more. He is best remembered for The Good Soldier, regarded as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and the tetralogy, Parade’s End.

Nicholas Delbanco is the author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, including Reprise: The Collected Stories of Nicholas Delbanco, Still Life at Eighty: A Memoir, and Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France. He is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.

Janice Biala (1903-2000) was a Polish-born American artist. She illustrated several of Ford Madox Ford’s books and was his partner for the last years of his life.

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