Charles Henri Ford

Charles Henri Ford
Born	February 10, 1913 Brookhaven, Mississippi, U.S.
Died	September 27, 2002 New York City, New York, U.S.
Resting place	Rose Hill Cemetery, Brookhaven, Lincoln County, Mississippi, U.S.

Charles Henri Ford (February 10, 1908 – September 27, 2002) was an American poet, novelist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist best known for his editorship of the Surrealist magazine View (1940–1947) in New York City, and as the partner of the artist Pavel Tchelitchew.

Born in Brookhaven, Mississippi, he dropped out of high school and by age 16 he had started his first magazine, Blues(subtitled "A Bisexual Bimonthly"). Actress Ruth Ford (1911–2009) was his sister and only known sibling.

Not long after, he became part of Gertrude Stein's salon in Paris, where he met Natalie Barney, Man Ray, Kay Boyle, Janet Flanner, Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes (with whom he had an affair and travelled to Tangiers) and others of the American expatriate community in Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Près. He went to Morocco in 1932 at the suggestion of Paul Bowles, and there he typed Barnes' just-completed novel, Nightwood (1936), for her.

With Parker Tyler, who would later become a highly respected film critic, he co-authored The Young and Evil (1933), an energetically experimental novel with obvious debts to fellow writer Djuna Barnes, and also to Gertrude Stein, who called it "the novel that beat the Beat Generation by a generation". The novel portrays a collection of young genderqueer artists as they write poems, have sex, move in and out of cheap rented rooms, and duck into the neighborhood's many speakeasies. The characters' gender and sexual identities are presented candidly; it was this candor which was reportedly the reason for its rejection by several American and British publishers. It was finally picked up by Obelisk Press in Paris.

...
Wikipedia