Series: Library of America Lynd Ward Edition
The second volume of collected woodcut graphic novels from a brilliant and iconoclastic author who has been compared to Frank Capra and John Steinbeck (Jonathan Lethem, New York Timesbestselling author of TheFortress of Solitude)In this, the second oftwo volumescollecting all his woodcut novels, The Library of America brings together Lynd Wards three later books, two of them brief, the visual equivalent of chamber music, the other his longest, a symphony in three movements. Prelude to a Million Years (1933) is a dark meditation on art, inspiration, and the disparity between the ideal and the real. Song Without Words (1936), a protest against the rise of European fascism, asks if ours is a world still fit for the human soul. Vertigo (1937), Wards undisputed masterpiece, is an epic novel on the theme of the individual caught in the downward spiral of a sinking American economy. Its characters include a young violinist, her luckless fianc, and an elderly business magnate whomovingly, and without ever becoming a political caricatureembodies the social forces determining their fate.The images reproduced in this volume are taken from prints pulled from the original woodblocks or first-generation electrotypes. Wards 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 four essays in which he discusses the technical challenges of his craft. Art Spiegelman contributes an introductory essay, Reading Pictures, that defines Wards towering achievement in that most demanding of graphic-story forms, the wordless novel in woodcuts.
About Artists & Writers:
Lynd Wardwas 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 Prizewinning graphic memoirMaus: A Survivors Tale andBreakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, among many other works.