If you enjoy graphic novels, you’ll be interested in Lynd Kendall Ward, who was born June 26, 1905, and kind of invented (or at least heavily influenced) the genre.
He was born in Chicago, and named after Lyndhurst, the English town his father had lived in before emigrating to the US. He decided to become an artist in first grade, when his teacher told him that his surname “Ward” was the word “draw” backwards. An odd reason, maybe, but a good choice; he was quite talented and graduated high school with honors in art (also math and debate).
From there he attended Columbia College in New York, where he majored in fine arts. The US in those days was not at all a center of art or design, so when Ward got married after college, he and his wife traveled to Europe, where they stayed for more than a year. During his European stay, Ward learned etching, lithography, and wood engraving from European masters. By chance he found two “wordless novels” at a book stall in Germany; both were stories told through woodcuts and leadcuts.
Back in New York, Ward received a commission to illustrate a children’s book with watercolors and drawings. He continued that work throughout his career, and ended up having illustrated more than 100 children’s books. In 1929 he created his own first “woodcut novel”, God’s Man. It was the first “wordless novel” created in the US. It sold tens of thousands of copies, and kept getting reissued through six editions. It was so successful he created five more over the next few years.
During the 1930s he became the supervisor of the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Arts Project, which aimed to provide jobs for artists as well as create public art. He managed 300 artists, and the project produced 5,000 prints per year. After WWII he continued working in various media, and worked on a couple more woodcut novels, but didn’t finish them.
Ward’s work was often political, and addressed class issues and labor problems. He was also an organizer founded the Equinox Cooperative Press to work against what he felt was overly mechanized approaches to publishing. Ward’s work, published and unpublished, is largely housed in the Penn State University library. You can find out more about him if you can find the documentary O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward. And if you want to see a good example of work often based on his, just pick up a graphic novel. Or as they used to say, a “wordless novel.”
