SOURCE: A review of Parade's End, in Shenandoah, Vol. 1, No. 3, Winter, 1950, pp. 29-36.

In the following essay, Tobyansen offers a thematic overview of Parade's End and discusses the novel's principal characters.

Parade's End is a single volume containing four of Ford's earlier novels, Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up and The Last Post, and an introduction by Robie Macauley. The four novels, published originally over a five-year period (1924-1928), achieved only brief popularity. When they first appeared, they were considered as merely another group of "war novels." In the Knopf volume they appear as what they should be—one great novel—titled Parde's End, The whole volume is an accurate presentation of the personal and univeral histories of several people and a country in the years immediately before, during, and after the first great war. This was a period in which tradition, the...