ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Ford's non-fiction on various cities, to identify whether Ford put forward any coherent theory of the city as a phenomenon. Furthermore, where some of the leading figures in European modernism were migr Americans responding variously to London or Paris, Ford, besides writing on both places, also writes about New York as early as 1907 and later in the 1920s and 1930s. The Soul of London has perhaps become Ford's most widely read non-fiction work, and is also a key example of literary Impressionism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ford neither romanticises and sentimentalises the past nor rules the future out, though there is none of the fetishisation of a future, utopian city as found in, say, H. G. Wells. Perhaps that is linked to Ford's early rejection of Fabianism. Overall, Ford's response to the growing modern city, in 1905, is positive.
