Description

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“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This line from director John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance serves as an epigraph for the life of the legendary filmmaker.

Through a career that spanned decades and included dozens of films—among them such American masterpieces as The Searchers, The Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man, Stagecoach, and How Green Was My Valley—John Ford managed to leave as his legacy a body of work that few filmmakers will ever equal. Yet as bold as the stamp of his personality was on each film, he was reticent about his personal life. Basically shy, and intensely private, he was known to enjoy making up stories about himself, some of them based loosely on fact but many of them pure fabrications. Ford preferred instead to let his films speak for him. What mattered to Ford was always what was up there on the screen.

Now, in this definitive look at the life and career of one of America's true cinematic giants, noted biographer and critic Scott Eyman, working with the full participation of the Ford estate, has managed to document and delineate both aspects of John Ford’s life—the human and the legend.

About the Author

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Scott Eyman was formerly the literary critic at The Palm Beach Post and is the author or coauthor of sixteen books, including the bestseller John Wayne and Pieces of My Heart and You Must Remember This with actor Robert Wagner. Eyman also writes book reviews for The Wall Street Journal, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He and his wife, Lynn, live in West Palm Beach.

Praise For…

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"Eyman has emerged as one of the most distinguished and reliable of popular film historians. Print the Legend displays his broad knowledge, his tact, his willingness to credit other writers, his capacity to avoid sensationalism but not to flinch from difficult truths." --Robert Sklar, Washington Post Book World
— Review

"Everything about this model biography is a pleasure."
— Malcolm Jones

"A quietly magnificent biography of an American original.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A thorough, honest, empathetic biography that examines both the man and his towering achievements.”
— Leonard Maltin