Charles Henri Ford

Charles Henri Ford was a poet, an editor, a novelist, an artist, and a cultural catalyst whose career spanned much of 20th-century modernism. Ford claimed inspiration from filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist Jean Cocteau and Cocteau's description of himself as "a poet in everything he does."

Ford is considered by some the first American surrealist poet and a precursor of the New York School. His first poem appeared in the New Yorker while he was still a teenager and he eventually published 16 books of poetry. Ford cowrote The Young and Evil (1933), which many consider the first gay novel, with his lifelong friend the writer and film critic Parker Tyler. The book is based on the author's adventures in Greenwich Village and was banned in the United States until the 1960s.

Ford was the editor of View, the premiere surrealist and figurative art and literature magazine of the 1940s and served as a coeditor for Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms along with Kathleen Tankersley Young and Parker Tyler. Blues published work by poets including E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky. 

Ford passed away in 2002