John Ford remains the most honoured director in Hollywood history, having won six Academy Awards and four New York Film Critics Awards. Drawing upon extensive written and oral history, Ronald L. David explores Ford's career from his silent classic, The Iron Horse, through the transition to sound, and then into the pioneer years of location filming, the golden years of Hollywood and the movement toward television. During his career, Ford made such classics as Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Searchers - 136 pictures in all, 54 of them Westerns. The complexity of his personality comes alive here through the eyes of his colleagues, friends, relatives, film critics and the actors he worked with, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara and Katharine Hepburn.