Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43 - Hardcover

Hendrickson, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810943484 ISBN 13: 9780810943483

Publisher: Abrams, 2004

Synopsis

An array of 180 full-color photographs from the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration collection, taken by FSA photographers from 1939 to 1943, creates a vivid portrait of America as it began to emerge from the Great Depression and prepared to fight World War II.

About this title

Review:

Thanks to famous documentary photographs of Americans during the Great Depression, we tend to visualize everything that happened in the 1930s in black-and-white. In fact, Kodachrome first became available in the U.S. in 1935, and several photographers for the Farm Security Administration experimented with the new color film as they traveled across the country. Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43 presents an oddly startling world of small towns and country roads ablaze in the vivid hues of real life. A sunburned family in Pie Town, New Mexico, eat a dinner of homemade biscuits, grits, and gravy. Sisters wearing print dresses all made from the same rose and blue fabric seem dazed at the wonders of a state fair in Vermont. Work horses graze on bright green grass under a moody Kansas sky. Chosen from an archive of about 1,600 vintage color slides, the 175 photos in the book are the work of several documentary photographers, including Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano. Partway through this panorama of Americana, the tone and subject matter shift. Suddenly, the U.S. is at war, and the casual, unposed quality of the earlier images shifts into self-conscious glorification of the American war effort by the Office of War Information, with shots of steel mills and train yards, and of women newly hired by factories to assemble bomber parts. It's clear from Paul Hendrickson's engaging introduction that the pre-war images are the ones he finds most captivating. This slender volume--which aptly borrows the title of Dustbowl troubadour Woody Guthrie's autobiography--offers a window on a distant era in which grinding poverty and racial segregation coexist with the simple pleasures of rural and small-town life. —Cathy Curtis

About the Author:

Paul Hendrickson, a longtime feature writer for the Washington Post, now teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, and the recent Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy. He lives in Philadelphia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Abrams
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0810943484
• ISBN 13: 9780810943483
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192