Now Comes Theodora (Daniel Ford)

Now Comes Theodora

In theory, this was my first novel, but by the time I wrote it, I'd written half a dozen novels that went nowhere. Usually they involved the life and loves of an upwardly striving, first-generation Irish-American whose first name was usually Stephen, in a tribute to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gradually, however, I moved away from Stephen's obsession with himself, and the further I went, the friendlier the reception from editors and literary agents. By 1963 my hero was a photographer named Boris, who oddly had no last name. (I have since given him one.)

I lived in a house trailer on the outskirts of a college town, but I put Boris in a Quonset hut, which I peopled with a band of peaceniks and dropouts like those I drank with on Saturday nights. (About the same time, to my amusement, Joseph McElroy was borrowing me and my house trailer to decorate one of his novels.)

It all worked out just as it should have. An agent named Mavis McIntosh agreed to show Now Comes Theodora around, and an editor named Ellin Roberts agreed to buy it for publication by Doubleday & Co. I took the very handsome advance (the equivalent of $25,000 in today's much-debauched greenbacks) and bought a ticket to Saigon, an adventure that gave me the grist for Incident at Muc Wa. So wasn't that a great way to make a literary debut?

Buy the paperback

Now Comes Theodora: A Story of the 1960s sells for $12.95 at all the best places:

Amazon's US store - Amazon's other stores

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Buy the ebook

And you'll find the digital Theodora (just $3.95) at online booksellers and libraries:

Amazon's US store - Amazon stores worldwide

Apple Books - Barnes & Noble - Kobo - Google

Other stores and subscription services

What the reviewers said

"Mr. Ford has the perception to separate the attitudes of the day from the students who strike them, creating a richly colorful novel rather than a series of dialogues." Martin Levin in the New York Times

"... an effervescent eye-opener giving one an insight of today's frightened and rebellious younger generation." Lucille Goodyear in the Arizona Republic

"Mr. Ford presents his characters in the best possible light--he likes them--and then lets them go ahead and do exactly what they want to do, or have to do. It is impossible not to keep on watching them, simply because they are so human and so young and selfish and opinionated and anxious.... The clear-sighted, unangry Mr. Ford will undoubtedly write another novel, which means we all have something to look forward to." The New Yorker

Publishing history

Now Comes Theodora was published in hardcover by Doubleday & Co. in 1965, as an Avon paperback in 1966 and again in 1972, by the Authors Guild Back-in-Print program in 2000, and now in a new and less expensive edition from Warbird Books.

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Novels: Incident at Muc Wa | The High Country Illuminator | Remains | Now Comes Theodora | Michael's War

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