Ford Madox Ford

Born Ford Hermann Hueffer, grandson of the painter Ford Madox Brown, he anglicized his name after the First World War amid anti-German feeling, having already spent years co-writing novels with his close friend Joseph Conrad and absorbing Conrad's belief that prose should render impressions, not just facts.

As an editor he had an outsized eye for talent, publishing early work by D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and Hemingway in the English Review and the Transatlantic Review. The Good Soldier (1915) put his own theories into practice: a devastating story of two marriages and a betrayal, told achronologically by a narrator who barely understands what he's confessing.

He served in the trenches in his forties, wrote it into the four-volume Parade's End, and spent his last years shuttling between Paris, Provence, and America, mentoring younger writers on both continents. He died in France in 1939.