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Provence

Provence

by Ford Madox Ford, introduction by Nicholas Delbanco, illustrated by Janice Biala

$19.95
$19.95
Available as E-Book Biography & Memoir British & Irish Literature Travel
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Pre-World War II Provence, “not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind,” is the subject of Ford Madox Ford’s whimsically comprehensive exploration of the history, personal experience, and miscellaneous sensations that enrich his vision of the region.

With a new introduction by Nicholas Delbanco, and illustrations by Ford’s companion, Janice Biala, Provence is not so much a travel narrative as an invocation, recalling to mind the fascination this quiet, fertile place held for artists and writers during a period of imminent cultural and political upheaval.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230427
Pages: 400
Publication Date:

Praise

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

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