A Man Could Stand Up

“A series that is, to put it mildly, a breathtaking, Herculean project, to which Mr. Ford thus far has done complete justice. They are the summation of the close of an epoch. One of the notably important contributions of the present century to the English novel.”
—New York Times

Ford Madox Ford’s A Man Could Stand Up—the third volume of his masterful Parade’s End—captures the fragile close of the First World War, where private longing collides with public upheaval. As news of the Armistice spreads through London, Christopher Tietjens, principled to the point of self-erasure, moves through a city trembling on the edge of peace, while Valentine Wannop waits, poised between hope and resignation. Ford renders time with extraordinary subtlety: the past presses into the present, memory and perception folding into one another as characters struggle to locate themselves in a world irrevocably altered. In prose at once impressionistic and exact, he charts the disintegration of Edwardian certainties and the tentative emergence of a new moral landscape. Both intimate and panoramic, A Man Could Stand Up stands as one of the great achievements of twentieth-century fiction. This Warbler Classics edition faithfully reproduces the original 1926 text and includes a detailed biographical timeline.

FORD MADOX FORD (1873–1939) was born Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer in Kent, England. He was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and editor whose influential journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review promoted the work of such writers as Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and D. H. Lawrence. Ford is best known for The Good Soldier, the Parade’s End tetralogy, and the The Fifth Queen trilogy.