Lynd Ward’s last book in this genre was Vertigo, an unusually lengthy depiction of three people’s lives during the Depression. For 10 points each:
[10h] Name these expressionist books popular in the 1920s and 30s. Frans Masereel’s Passionate Journey is one of these books, which often focused on the struggles of the working class.
ANSWER: wordless novels [accept woodcut novels; accept novel in woodcuts]
[10e] This cartoonist and Lynd Ward fan paid homage to wordless novels in the expressionist strip “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” which appears in this cartoonist’s graphic novel Maus.
ANSWER: Art Spiegelman [or Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman]
[10m] Laurence Hyde’s wordless novel Southern Cross uses unusually curved woodcuts to depict one of these events. A 30-thousand word New Yorker piece follows six people after one of these events, including a seamstress and a priest.
ANSWER: nuclear blasts [accept answers indicating the explosion of nuclear weapons; accept atomic bombings or nuclear tests; prompt on bombings] (That piece is Hiroshima by John Hersey.)
<Henry Atkins, American Literature>