Woodcuts, U.S.A

the long version

The same year that the House Committee on Un-American Activities published "Report on Civil Rights Congress as a communist front organization", Woodcuts U.S.A., a book containing 20 of Helen West Heller's 2 7/8" x 3 7/8" woodcuts, with quotes by American writers and a laudatory introduction by John Taylor Arms, was published in a limited signed edition of 750 copies by Oxford University Press, New York. A softcover edition (size: 6 1/8" x 4 1/2") was printed by The Merrymount Press, in 1947, with 16 woodcuts and printed wrappers of textural effects. Woodcuts U.S.A. presents a positive image of American life in the mid-1940s unlike the HUAC report. There are no images of authority: no industrialists, bankers, politicians, policemen, military personal or preachers. There are only images in woodcut celebrating ordinary Americans and their activities in labor combined with the words of America's great writers.