In his last years, Ford judged himself as no less than the Dean of English Letters. He firmly believed that he had played a major role in shaping the most important literary movement of the modern age, a movement he termed impressionism, and had been unerring in recognizing and supporting literary genius, including D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. He was also proud of the cultural standard he had set for his own career and was convinced that his theory of the small farmer or producer was the bane of modern technology and the salvation of civilized man.
Ford's self-judgment has a good measure of truth to it, but he wrote with an exaggeration about his life and career that still plagues and complicates objective efforts to evaluate his real contributions. Though he wrote thirty-four novels, only one, The Good Soldier (1915), stands out as a masterpiece of modern fiction, while four others, the tetralogy Ford titled Parade's End, are now regarded as major, if uneven, accomplishments. Ford produced nineteen minor novels—only his collaborations with Conrad are noteworthy—before The Good Soldier and never again wrote a single work with the same intensity and control.
