Picture Book

WILD PILGRIMAGE--Lynd Ward--Smith & Haas ($3).

Following Belgian Artist Franz Masereel, Lynd Ward's Gods' Man (TIME, Nov. 25, 1929) was the first U. S. novel-in-woodcuts. A few titles to sections helped keep readers' fingers on the story's thread. Wild Pilgrimage, his third woodcut "novel," must be "read" without benefit of caption or title, but it tells so straightforward a story that no clues are needed. Artist Ward adopts one innovation: pictures printed in black show the events of the narrative; in red, what the hero is thinking.

Hero is a young factory worker in a U.S. industrial town. Fed up with his drab, machined life he quits work, wanders out into the country. Going through some woods, he sees a Negro lynched. A farmer gives him a job. He casts lustful eyes on the farmer's wife, lets his imagination run away with him and tries to rape her. Her scream brings the old farmer, sends the hero flying. A vegetarian hermit takes him in, tries to teach him the good life. But he is obsessed by thoughts of the factory; he leaves the hermit and goes back to town. A strike is on; the police break up a labor meeting. He sees red, tries to kill a policeman. But it works the other way.

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