Gods' Man: A Novel in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward (1929)
Here's a novel you don't have to read. Except for the five chapter titles, there is not a word of print in the text. It is the first wordless novel published in America, comprised of 139 highly expressionistic woodcuts to tell a Faustian tale of sorcery, a magic paintbrush, dissolution, redemption, and then ultimate unavoidable conclusion.
The author, Lynd Ward (1905-1985) was influenced by two earlier European wordless novels, Frans Masereel's The Sun (1909) and Otto Nuckel's Destiny (1925). Gods' Man (note the placement of the apostrophe) was published the week before the Wall Street crash of 1929.; despite that, it had strong sales, went through three printings before the following January, and sold over 20,000 copies in six printings over its first four years. The book has been reprinted and anthologized many times over the years; in 2010, it was collected along with Ward's five later wordless novels in a two-volume Library of America edition.
Gods' Man was a direct inspiration for the next important American wordless novel, Milt Gross's parody He Done Her Wrong (1930). Ward's example also inspired cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner to create their first graphic novels.
Then novel has an otherworldly intensity that jumps from scene to scene to create a flowing narrative, as well as impending sense of doom. It is really a unique book and is now available to be read online for the first time.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822005732359&seq=9
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