Ford Maddox Ford

James Baldwin's copy of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

• Ford Madox Ford (British).
• Introduction by Mark Schorer.
• New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
• Octavo.
• 256 pages.
• First Borzai edition.
• With James Baldwin's ownership ink on the front free endpaper: "James Baldwin / N.Y. / '52."
• Bound in publisher's full black cloth.

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is considered one of the great works of the 20th century. James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room was considered a controversial queer novel upon publication and is now considered a key work in the canon of gay literature.

Colm Tóibín, in his essay 'Baldwin's complex fate' for Prospect Magazine in April 2016, writes: "Baldwin’s book [Giovanni's Room] is also close to Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier in the slow and tortuous going over of events in the past in order to come to some understanding of sexual treachery. This is not to suggest that Baldwin was influenced by these other texts, or that he even read them, but rather that the confession form itself, in a time when so much about sex and sexual motive was kept dark and hidden, can have a special and searing intensity. It is especially open to a heightened tone, the tone of self-awareness and self-knowledge being forced on to the page as though after a struggle, the tone of things being said for the very first time."

This copy of The Good Soldier answers the question of whether Baldwin read Ford in the process of writing Giovanni's Room, published in 1956. With the date of 1952, Baldwin probably picked it up on his only visit to the United States that year. After finishing Go Tell It on the Mountain in February of 1952, he sent it off to New York. "Within months, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf expressed interest, and Baldwin returned to New York—the first time in three-and-a-half years—to meet the publisher and visit his family."