John Ford

Charles Barr (St. Mary's College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 1 Feb 1894
Died 31 Aug 1973
Activity 1917-1971

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Film Director
Film/TV Script-writer/ Screenwriter

Resources

Ford's Works

Save to Bookshelf

Look up John Ford in a literary reference work, and you expect to find material on a Jacobean dramatist, not a Hollywood film-maker. So what is the director of

My Darling Clementine

doing here alongside the writer of '

Tis Pity She's a Whore

? One plausible answer is that he directed screen adaptations of some respected works of literature, among them Liam O'Flaherty's

The Informer

and John Steinbeck's

The Grapes of Wrath.

Those films are indeed exemplary in the way they rethink and rework the originals for a cinema audience in cinematic terms — mistily expressionist visuals for O'Flaherty's Dublin, starkly realist ones for Steinbeck's America — and they won multiple Oscars in 1935 and 1940 respectively. But they hardly represent John Ford's main strength, or his main interest for the…

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2751 words

Citation: Barr, Charles. "John Ford". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 August 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4983, accessed 25 November 2024.]