Charles Henri Ford

Born in Mississippi, USA, Charles Henri Ford (1913-2002) was a prolific artist, poet, editor, and filmmaker whose lifelong dedication to cultural experiment placed him at the heart of the most urgent literary and artistic circles throughout the 20th century. Ford published his first two poems in The New Yorker while still in his teens and proceeded to publish poetry in various magazines as well as launching a journal for experimental writing with Parker Tyler and Kathleen Tankersley, Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms (subtitled ‘A Bisexual Bimonthly’). After becoming a fixture in the expatriate literary community of Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon, in 1933 he and Tyler co-authored The Young and Evil, a novel whose pioneering and candid depiction of the queer underground in Greenwich Village led to the book’s censorship in Britain and the United States. From 1940 to 1947, Ford joined forces again with Tyler to publish View, a key independent magazine whose contributors included major figures in surrealist literature and art. Ford continues to be considered America’s first Surrealist poet and a precursor of the New York School and the Beat movement.