The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford -The Good Soldier opens with the famous line: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel, chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham, the soldier to whom the title refers. Dowell tells a winding tale of passion and deceit in a rambling, non-chronological fashion—a literary technique that formed part of Ford’s pioneering view of literary impressionism. Ford’s masterful use of the unreliable narrator leaves the reader to consider the true nature of the events that unfold. Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was born Ford Hermann 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, and Ernest Hemingway, and debuted works of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence. The Good Soldier was published in 1915, the year Ford enlisted in the army where he served as an infantry officer during the Battle of the Somme and at the Ypres Salient. Ford is also known for Parade’s End, a series of four novels about his experiences during the First World War. The Good Soldier is counted among the greatest works of literature of the twentieth century. "One of the finest novels of our century.” —Graham Greene