Journal Article

AMERICA'S FORD: GLENWAY WESCOTT, KATHERINE ANNE PORTER AND KNOPF'S \PARADE'S END\

O'Malley, Seamus

2012

Overview

In the early 1920s Ford Madox Ford began a long process of career reevaluation. Moving to rural retreats to recover from shell-shock and to work through his writer's block, Ford became a destination for young American writers apprenticing in Europe. Glenway Wescott and Katherine Anne Porter were two prominent fiction writers who sought Ford's advice and became his protégés - a process not without tensions, despite their creative and professional gains from his mentorship. According to Ford's memoirs, this period is also when he began to envisage a primarily American audience for his novel cycle to deal with his experience in the Great War, and he spent more time in the United States after the completion of the 'Tietjens novels'. It is fitting, then, that it was the New York-based publishing house Knopf that decided to bring those works back into print and sell them as one omnibus volume for the first time. Knopfs decision, accompanied by an American-centric pamphlet promoting the release of the newlytitled Parade's End, was momentous for Ford studies, and provided for several generations of readers and critics the opportunity to keep Ford in the literary canon.

• Publisher: Rodopi
• Subject: SECTION 1: FORD'S AMERICAN GENEALOGY