page_title: Wordless novel
section_title: In North America
hierarchical_section_title: Wordless novel / History / In North America
caption_attribution_description: English: A panel from Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong (1931); Gross parodies Lynd Ward's woodcut style
context_page_description: The wordless novel is a narrative genre that uses sequences of captionless pictures to tell a story. As artists have often made such books using woodcut and other relief printing techniques, the terms woodcut novel or novel in woodcuts are also used. The genre flourished primarily in the 1920s and 1930s and was most popular in Germany.
  The wordless novel has its origin in the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century. The typically socialist work drew inspiration from medieval woodcuts and used the awkward look of that medium to express angst and frustration at social injustice. The first such book was the Belgian Frans Masereel's 25 Images of a Man's Passion, published in 1918. The German Otto Nückel and other artists followed Masereel's example. Lynd Ward brought the genre to the United States in 1929 when he produced Gods' Man, which inspired other American wordless novels and a parody in 1930 by cartoonist Milt Gross with He Done Her Wrong. Following an early-1930s peak in production and popularity, the genre waned in the face of competition from sound films and anti-socialist censorship in Nazi Germany and the US.
context_section_description: In 1926, the American Lynd Ward (1905–1985) moved to Leipzig to study graphic arts; while there, he discovered the works of Masereel and Otto Nückel.  He produced six such works of his own; he preferred to call them "pictorial narratives". The first, Gods' Man (1929), was his most popular.  Ward used wood engraving rather than woodcutting and varied image sizes from page to page.  Gods' Man sold 20,000 copies, and other American artists followed up on this success with their own wordless novels in the 1930s.
  Cartoonist Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong (1930) was a parody of the genre; the book uses varying panel designs akin to those of comics: the action sometimes takes place outside the panel borders and "dialogue balloons" show in images what the characters are saying.  Cartoonist and illustrator William Gropper's Alay-oop (1930) tells of three entertainers' disappointed dreams.  In Abraham Lincoln: Biography in Woodcuts (1933) Charles Turzak documented the American president.  Animator Myron Waldman (1908–2006) wrote a wordless tale of a plump young woman looking for a glamorous husband.  The book, Eve (1943), also uses "picture balloons" as He Done Her Wrong does.
  Inspired by mediaeval religious block books and working in an Art Deco style, American illustrator James Reid (1907–1989) produced one wordless novel, The Life of Christ (1930); due to the book's religious content, the Soviet Union barred its importation under its policies on religion.
  In 1938, Italian-American Giacomo Patri (1898–1978) produced his only wordless novel, the linocut White Collar.  It chronicles the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash and was intended to motivate white-collar workers to unionize.  It also deals with controversial topics such as abortion, accessibility of health care for the poor, and loss of Christian faith.  From 1948 to 1951, Canadian Laurence Hyde (1914–1987) produced his single wordless novel, the woodcut Southern Cross, in response to the American atomic tests in the Bikini Atoll.  The work tells of an American evacuation of an island for nuclear tests, where one family is left behind.  Polish-American Si Lewen's (1918– ) first book, The Parade: A Story in 55 Drawings (1957), won praise from Albert Einstein for its anti-war message.  Canadian George Kuthan's Aphrodite's Cup (1964) is an erotic book drawn in an ancient Greek style.  In the early 21st century, Canadian George Walker made wordless woodcut novels, beginning with Book of Hours (2010), about the lives of those in the World Trade Center complex just before the September 11 attacks.
caption: In He Done Her Wrong (1930), Milt Gross parodied Lynd Ward's Gods' Man (1929).
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