SOURCE: An introduction to Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford, Alfred A. Knopf, 1950, pp. v-xxii.

Macauley is an American author and educator. In the following introduction to the first edition of Parade's End, he affirms that the tetralogy should be considered as a single work rather than as four separate novels published together for the first time.

The year before he died Ford Madox Ford used to walk around the campus at Olivet College like a pensioned veteran of forgotten wars. We took him for a kind of vast, benevolent and harmless Uncle Toby, leaning on his stick in class or sitting in his dark little basement office and wheezing out his stories of Henry James as Toby might have spoken of Marlborough. His books seemed like medals achieved, perhaps, in the Crimea; and we read Auden, Kafka, Evelyn Waugh.

We were no different from the rest of...