Lynd Ward

His father, Harry F. Ward, was born in Chiswick, England, in 1873; the elder Ward was a Methodist who moved to the United States in 1891 after reading the progressive Social Aspects of Christianity (1889) by Richard T. Ely.

He named his son after the rural town of Lyndhurst, located in the south coastal county of Hampshire, where he had lived for two years as a teenager prior to his emigration.

Ward's mother, Harriet May "Daisy" Kendall Ward, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1873.

The couple met at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, and were married in 1899.

His roommate arranged a blind date for Ward and May Yonge McNeer (1902–1994) in 1923; May had been the first female undergraduate at the University of Georgia in her freshman year.

Lynd Kendall Ward (June 26, 1905 – June 28, 1985) was an American artist and novelist, known for his series of wordless novels using wood engraving, and his illustrations for juvenile and adult books.

His wordless novels have influenced the development of the graphic novel.

Although strongly associated with his wood engravings, he also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint.

Ward was born on June 26, 1905, in Chicago, Illinois.

Their first child, Gordon Hugh Ward, was born in June 1903, and a third, Muriel Ward, was born February 18, 1907.

Soon after birth, Ward developed tuberculosis; his parents took him north of Sault Ste. Marie in Canada for several months to recover.

He partly recovered, and continued to suffer from symptoms of the disease throughout his childhood, as well as from inner ear and mastoid infections.

In the hope of improving his health, the family moved to Oak Park, Illinois, where his father became a pastor at the Euclid Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church.

Ward was early drawn to art and decided to become an artist when his first-grade teacher told him that "Ward" spelled backward is "draw".

Having skipped a grade, Ward graduated from grammar school a year early in 1918.

The family moved to Englewood, New Jersey, and Ward entered Englewood High School, where he became art editor of the school newspaper and yearbook, and learned linoleum-block printing.

While browsing a bookstall in Leipzig, Ward chanced across two important wordless novels: Flemish artist Frans Masereel's The Sun (1919), a story told in sixty-three woodcuts without captions, and Otto Nückel's Destiny (1926), a lead-cut narrative that is much darker and more naturalistic than Masereel's novel.

Ward was a son of Methodist minister, political organizer and radical social activist Harry F. Ward, the first chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union on its founding in 1920.

His best-known books are Gods' Man and his Caldecott-winning children's story, The Biggest Bear.

In 1922, he graduated with honors in art, mathematics, and debate.

Ward studied fine arts at Columbia Teachers College in New York.

He edited the Jester of Columbia, to which he contributed arts and crafts how-to articles.

The two married on June 11, 1926, shortly after their graduation, and immediately left for Europe on their honeymoon.

After four months in eastern Europe, the couple settled in Leipzig, Germany for a year, where Ward studied as a special one-year student at the.

He learned etching from Alois Kolb, lithography from, and wood engraving from Hans Alexander "Theodore" Mueller; Ward was particularly influenced by Mueller.

Ward returned to New York in September 1927 and met a number of editors who showed interest in his portfolio.

In 1928, his first commissioned work illustrated Dorothy Rowe's The Begging Deer: And Other Stories of Japanese Children with eight full-page watercolor and forty-two ink and brush drawings.

May have helped with background research for the illustrations, and wrote another book of Japanese folk tales, Prince Bantam (1929), with illustrations by Ward.

Other work at the time included illustrations for the children's book Little Blacknose by Hildegarde Swift, and an illustrated edition of Oscar Wilde's poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol".

In 1929, Ward was inspired to create a woodcut novel of his own.

The first American wordless novel, Gods' Man, was published by Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith that October, the week before the Wall Street Crash of 1929; over the next four years, it sold more than 20,000 copies in six editions.

Ward published five more such works: Madman's Drum (1930), Wild Pilgrimage (1932), Prelude to a Million Years (1933), Song Without Words (1936), and Vertigo (1937).

During the 1930s, Ward became well known for the political themes of his graphic work, which often addressed class and labor issues.

In 1932 he founded Equinox Cooperative Press as a response to the mechanized routines of the modern publishing business.

Each of the sixteen books eventually published by the press was custom designed and printed.

Around 1940, he produced roughly twenty wood engravings for another woodcut narrative, titled Hymn for the Night, but never finished the project.

During the 1970s, Ward worked on an ambitious wordless novel, tentatively titled Dance of the Hours, which at his death consisted of 77 woodblocks in various stages of completion.

In 2001, Rutgers University Libraries published images from 26 of the most finished blocks as Lynd Ward's Last Unfinished Wordless Novel.

In addition to woodcuts, Ward also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint.

He illustrated over a hundred children's books, several of which were collaborations with his wife, May.