Ford Madox Ford collection

Correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, broadsides, bound manuscripts, photographs, and clippings, mainly spanning the period from the maturity of Ford's grandfather, Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, to the death of Ford himself. Material from Ford's career ranges from unpublished novels and short stories of the 1890's and early 1900's to journal articles, literary reviews, lectures, addresses, and radio talks he wrote or delivered in the last 20 years of his life, including complete manuscripts of many published and unpublished novels, nonfiction books, stories, poems, plays, essays, and musical compositions. Included are the manuscript of "Seraphina," the basis of the novel Romance which Ford wrote with Joseph Conrad; manuscripts of Ford's novels The Fifth Queen, The Privy Seal, The Heart of the Country, The Young Lovell, and Women and Men; a complete version and a "printer's copy" of The Good Soldier; manuscripts of a number of Ford's nonfiction works, including his biography of Ford Madox Brown; and some issues of the literary magazines he edited, the English Review and the Transatlantic Review. The collection also contains galley proofs (9 leaves) with James Joyce's corrections of his Work in Progress, a fragment of Finnegan's Wake that appeared in the Transatlantic Review.

Also included are postcards from Ford depicting scenes from Germany before World War I; letters and articles documenting Ford's increasing concern about Nazi expansionism, and his efforts to help Jewish refugees, in the 1930's; Arthur Mizener's manuscript material and correspondence for his biography of Ford, The Saddest Story; and David Dow Harvey's manuscripts for his bibliography of Ford.

Correspondence includes Ford's letters to his wife Elsie Martindale, daughters Katharine Hueffer Lamb and Julia Madox Loewe, and lovers Violet Hunt and Stella Bowen; Ford's army correspondence notebook from World War I, and letters to Joseph Conrad from the front; and much additional correspondence with Conrad and other writers, literary agents, and publishers. Correspondents include, in addition to those named above, Henry James, H.G. Wells, Ezra Pound, Jean Stafford, W.H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, Allen Tate, Theodore Dreiser, T.S. Eliot, John Ruskin, Ford Madox Brown, and publishers including Greenslet, Gollancz, Munson, Lippincott, and Allen and Unwin. Also included is correspondence of Ford's biographer Arthur Mizener with Janice Biala, Rebecca West, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and others.