A significant copy of Ford’s The Good Soldier has appeared on the market, offering a tangible link between Ford and James Baldwin (1924–1987), one of the 20th century’s most influential American voices: an essayist, novelist, and playwright who explored the complexities of race, sexuality, and the human heart. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain was ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century.
This 1951 Knopf edition of The Good Soldier, currently listed by Second Story Books for $20,000, bears the inscription “James Baldwin / N.Y. / ’52”. This discovery is of particular interest, as critics have noted stylistic parallels between Ford’s masterpiece and Baldwin’s 1956 queer classic, Giovanni’s Room. In his 2016 essay “Baldwin’s Complex Fate” for Prospect Magazine, Colm Tóibín noted that the two books share a “slow and tortuous going over of events in the past in order to come to some understanding of sexual treachery”, whilst acknowledging that it was then unknown whether Baldwin had read The Good Soldier.
This volume confirms that Baldwin was indeed reading Ford during the period leading up to the publication of Giovanni’s Room, providing rare evidence of Ford’s technical impact on Baldwin’s creative evolution. As the seller’s description states, “This copy would benefit from further scholarly research, as its place in the creation of Giovanni’s Room is largely unexplored. The relationship between two of the great novels of the 20th century, especially when read through a queer lens as Baldwin would have done, also is worth exploring in depth.”
