Charles Henri Ford was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi, to native Mississippians Charles Lloyd and Gertrude Cato Ford. He began his literary career in Columbus, Mississippi, as the founder of Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms, which he edited with the assistance of Parker Tyler and Kathleen Tankersley Young. Although they published only nine issues, the magazine's contributors included William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Kay Boyle as well as Bravig Imbs, Edgar Calmer, Harold Salemson, John Herrmann, and Alfred Kreymborg. Although the magazine was not well-received in the United States, it was viewed favorably on the Continent, and the contacts Ford made through this publication assured his welcome in the literary communities of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Pres when he arrived in Paris in 1931. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein praised both Ford and his magazine: "Of all the little magazines which...