Edited by Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic
novel Maus
A wordless novel in woodcuts from Lynd Ward, a pioneering
artist/novelist who was "an unmistakable soul-companion to . . . Frank
Capra and John Steinbeck, but also Fritz Lang and Franz Kafka" (Jonathan
Lethem)
From the Great Depression to WII, America's first great graphic novelist
bore witness to the roiling, dizzying national scene as both a master
printmaker and a socially committed storyteller.
In this, the first of two volumes collecting all his woodcut novels, The
Library of America brings together Lynd Ward's earliest books, published
when the artist was still in his twenties. Gods' Man (1929), the
audaciously ambitious work that made Ward's reputation, is a modern
morality play, an allegory of the deadly bargain a striving young artist
often makes with life. Madman's Drum (1930), a multigenerational saga
worthy of Faulkner, traces the legacy of violence haunting a family
whose stock in trade is human souls. Wild Pilgrimage (1932), perhaps
the most accomplished of these early books, is a study in the
brutalization of an American factory worker whose heart can still
respond to beauty but whose mind is twisted in rage against the system
and its shackles.
The images reproduced in this volume are taken from prints pulled from
the original woodblocks or first-generation electrotypes. Ward's novels
are presented, for the first time since the 1930s, in the format that
the artist intended, one image per right-hand page, and are followed by
five essays in which he discusses the technical challenges of his craft.
Art Spiegelman contributes an introductory essay, "Reading Pictures,"
that defines Ward's towering achievement in that most demanding of
graphic-story forms.
