Provence - by Ford Madox Ford (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Now considered a cult classic, this dreamy portrait of Provence before World War II brings the storied region in vivid color. From one of the great British authors of the twentieth century, this whimsical, personal, and sensual overview of Provençal life, culture, architecture, and history will transport you straight to the south of France.

Ford Madox Ford wrote Provence in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression and escalating conflicts all around the world, which would come to a head in World War Il. At the time, Provence might have appealed as a refuge from a world gone wrong--the appeal remains--but in this book Ford, as the exploratory novelist and masterful critic that he was, had something bigger in view. Of course he describes, and delightfully, the natural splendor and the daily pleasures of his and his companion Janice Biala's life in this beautiful region of ancient renown. At the same time, however, he delves into its history, poetry, and art, depicting Provence as a great crossroads between civilizations that is the definition of civilization itself. Provence, Ford writes, is "not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind."

With a new introduction by Nicholas Delbanco and illustrations by Biala, Provence is not so much a travel narrative as an invocation. As Eudora Welty has said, "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."

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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.