God’s Man: A Novel in Woodcuts

by Lynd Ward
Dover Publications, Mineola NY, 2004
160 pp., illus. 139 b/w. Paper, $8.95
ISBN: 0-486-43500-8.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, USA

ballast@netins.net

Before seeing this book, I had never heard of Lynd Ward (1905-1985), an American artist and book illustrator who, as a first-grade pupil in Chicago, realized that his surname "Ward" was also "draw" spelled backwards. Trained as a teacher at Columbia University and as a printmaker in Leipzig, Germany, his influential mentors were the European expressionists, Frans Masereel and Otto Nuckel, both of whom are now well known for their wordless illustrated narratives (or "graphic novels"), which are made of a sequence of pictures, absent any written texts. Among the most famous examples of this method are the "collage novels" of the German surrealist Max Ernst, the first of which he published in 1929. Curiously, Lynd Ward also published his first visual novel, God’s Man (of which this is an unabridged reprint) in 1929; in fact, his book came off the press during the exact same week as the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. Surprisingly, given the circumstances, his experimental book sold well and, only a few months later, was already in its third printing. During the next eight years, Ward published five other woodcut novels, then moved on to a long and prolific career as an illustrator of children’s books, one of which (The Biggest Bear) won the Caldecott Medal in 1953. He may have been influenced by the style of Rockwell Kent, as a survey of his work suggests that his own was a singular mixture of German Expressionism and Art Deco.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, Autumn 2004).