Both biographically revealing and analyticallyastute, author Jay Caldwell offers a profound, new perspective on two of America'smost renowned midcentury artists at the peaks of their careers.

This is the story of the internationally acclaimed American woman Margaret Bourke-White, who for over thirty years made photographic history: as the first photographer to see the artistic and storytelling possibilities in American industry, as the first to write social criticism with a lens, and as the most distinguished and venturesome foreign correspondent-with-a-camera to report wars, politics and social and political revolution on three continents. In this poignant autobiography, Bourke-White details her fight against Parkinson’s disease, and recounts tales of her struggles to master her art and craft, of photographing Stalin, Gandhi and many other notables, of being torpedoed off North Africa while reporting World War II, of flying combat missions, of photographing the dread murder camps of Nazi Germany, of touring Tobacco Road to produce the book You Have Seen Their Faces with Erskine Caldwell (whom she later married), of adventures—and wonderful picture-taking—in the mines of South Africa, in the frozen North, in war-torn Korea. Illustrated throughout with over 70 of Margaret Bourke-White’s fine photographs, this is the great life story of a great American, greatly yet modestly told.

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South--from South Carolina to Arkansas--to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years. Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

Realism for the Masses is an exploration of how the concept of realism entered mass culture, and from there, how it tried to remake “America.” The literary and artistic creations of American realism are generally associated with the late nineteenth century. But this book argues that the aesthetic actually saturated American culture in the 1930s and 1940s and that the Left social movements of the period were in no small part responsible. The book examines the prose of Carlos Bulosan and H. T. Tsiang; the photo essays of Margaret Bourke-White in Life magazine; the bestsellers of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell; the boxing narratives of Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren; and the Hollywood boxing film, radio soap operas, and the domestic dramas of Lillian Hellman and Shirley Graham, and more. These writers and artists infused realist aesthetics into American mass culture to an unprecedented degree and also built on a tradition of realism in order to inject influential definitions of “the people” into American popular entertainment. Central to this book is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent notions of pluralism. Significantly, Vials identifies three nascent pluralisms of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal pluralism of “We're the People” in The Grapes of Wrath; the racially inclusive pluralism of Vice President Henry Wallace's “The People's Century”; and the proto-Cold War pluralism of Henry Luce's “The American Century.”

Profiles the life of the photojournalist who was an original staff photographer for "Life" magazine and a war correspondent during World War II.

The Pulitzer Prize winner presents a treasure chest of archival photographs that depict the historical events surrounding school desegregation.