Charles Henri Ford (February 10, 1908 – September 27, 2002) was an American poet, novelist, diarist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist.

He published more than a dozen collections of poetry, exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United States, edited the Surrealist magazine View (1940–1947) in New York City, and directed an experimental film.

Not long after, he became part of Gertrude Stein's salon in Paris, where he met Natalie Barney, Man Ray, Kay Boyle, Janet Flanner, Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes, and others of the American expatriate community in Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Près.

[10][11] Edith Sitwell burned her copy and described it as "entirely without soul, like a dead fish stinking in hell".

[5] The novel portrays a collection of young artists as they write poems, have sex, move in and out of cheap rented rooms, and explore the many speakeasies in their Greenwich Village neighborhood.

Visiting friends from abroad included Cecil Beaton, Leonor Fini, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Salvador Dalí.

He published in New Masses and gave voice to a black man confronting a lynch mob: "Now I climb death's tree./The pruning hooks of many mouths/cut the black-leaved boughs./The robins of my eyes hover where/sixteen leaves fall that were a prayer.

It attracted contributions from artists such as Tchelitchew, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Paul Klee, Albert Camus, Lawrence Durrell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Man Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Genet, René Magritte, Jean Dubuffet, and Edouard Roditi.

[16] Ford's book of poems Sleep in a Nest of Flames (1959) contained a preface by Dame Edith Sitwell.

They were "a particularly visual and outrageous form of concrete poetry" in which Ford exploited all he had learned of publishing, graphic design, and printing.

The Film-Makers' Cooperative has screened what it describes as the only surviving print of the film in festival settings, though some venues have refused to show it because of its explicit sexual content given the youthful appearance of some of the actors.

In 1973 he hired a local teenager, Indra Tamang, to run errands and cook, then taught him photography and made him his assistant.

Tamang remained at his side for the rest of Ford's life, "a sort of surrogate son", artistic collaborator, and personal caretaker.

Covering the years from his father's final illness to the death of Tchelitchew, it provided, according to Publishers Weekly, "richly observed details, both quotidian and unusual, constituting a delightful, moving, poetic portrait of a man and a subculture".

[26] Also in 2001, he was the subject of a two-hour documentary film, Sleep in a Nest of Flames, directed by James Dowell and John Kolomvakis.