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.
“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