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American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting
Steven Biel
With broad perspective, acute insight, and humor, Steven Biel explores the strangely enduring life of America's most popular painting. 30 illustrations and 8 pages of color.
W. W. Norton
June 2005
215 pages ISBN: 039305912X Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The origins and multiple meanings of Grant Wood's indelible
portrait. Is there anyone who has not seen the sturdy Iowa farmer
with his pitchfork and his thin-lipped wife or daughter?
Ever since it met the public eye in 1930, the work titled
American Gothic has elicited admiration, disgust,
reverence, and ridicule—and has been reproduced hundreds of
thousands of times, in every medium. Painted by a self-
proclaimed "bohemian" who studied in Paris, the image was
first seen as a critique of Midwestern Puritanism and what
H. L. Mencken called "the booboisie." During the
Depression, it came to represent endurance in hard times
through the quintessential American values of thrift, work,
and faith. Later, in television, advertising, politics, and
popular culture, American Gothic evolved into parody—all
the while remaining a lodestar by which one might measure
closeness to or distance from the American heartland.
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