Library of America Lynd Ward Edition

Lynd Ward

Sep. 2017 · Library of America Lynd Ward Edition Uitgawe #1 · Library of America

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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.

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Lynd Ward was born in 1905 in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of six novels in woodcuts and three picture books for children, and the illustrator of some two hundred other books. Storyteller Without Words, an autobiographical monograph on his work in wood engraving, was published in 1974. He died in 1985.

Art Spiegelman, volume editor, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, among many other works.