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| Bound For Glory: America In Color 1939-43
The photographs of The Farm Security Administration (FSA) and its successor agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), which recorded American life in the late 1930s and early 1940s, remain among the most moving and famous documentary images from the first half of the twentieth century. Yet few people know that, along with thousands of black-and-white photographs, the FSA/OWI photographers also took color pictures, using newly available Kodachrome film. Here, for the first time, is a selection of the best of the FSA color photographs–introduced by National Book Award finalist Paul Hendrickson and assembled to create a vivid portrait of America as it emerged from the Great Depression to fight World War II. The evocative power of these all-but-forgotten images is undeniable. As Hendrickson says, "When I look at the struggle coming up out of there pictures, I feel somehow as if I’m combing through my own ans the country’s ancestral attic with Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck and maybe the Andrews Sisters and the Great Gildersleve, too, all of us lingering here and there to laugh but more often cry over every broken porcelain doorknob and rusting Dr. Pepper sign." Covering countryside and city, farm and factory, work and play. The images in this book open a window onto our national experience from 1939 to 1943, revealing a world that we have always seen in our mind’s eye exclusively in black and white. Nver before has there been a book that paints this portrait in full color. Paul Hendrickson, a longtime feature writer for the Washington Post, now teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books, including Looking for the Light: 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. Available From: The
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