Lynd Kendall Ward 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 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.
1930 self portrait
A wood block engraved by Lynd Ward for plate #29 of his Prelude to a Million Years
Beowulf wrestles with Grendel by Lynd Ward (1933)
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.
Wordless novels flourished in Germany in the 1920s and typically were made using woodcut or similar techniques in an Expressionist style. (Frans Masereel, 25 Images of a Man's Passion, 1918)
Expressionist film and graphics inspired early wordless novels. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920)
Wordless novelists favoured relief printing such as in this wood engraving from Ward's Prelude to a Million Years (1933).
In He Done Her Wrong (1930), Milt Gross parodied Lynd Ward's Gods' Man (1929).