Herman Clarence Nixon: Forty Acres And A Steel Mule. Photographs by Farm Security Administration Photographers (Evans, Mydans, Lange, Rothstein, others). University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1938. 98 pp. Quarto. First edition. Full linen in photo-illustrated dust jacket. Black-and-white reproductions.
An important study of the South during the Depression that is in the tradition of Dorthea Lange and Paul Taylor's An American Exodus, Land of the Free by Archibald Mac Leish (also with a selection of FSA photos), and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces.
"Published in 1938 in Chapel Hill by the University of North Carolina Press, Herman Clarence Nixon’s Forty Acres and Steel Mules uses a large number of photographs from the Farm Security Administration. The preface declares Nixon’s attempt at "a fresh and integrated interpretation of the rural south" (v). It gestures at Nixon’s previous writing, including "Whither Southern Economy?" in I’ll Take My Stand by Twelve Southerners (Harper & Brothers, 1930), and "The New South and the Old Crop" in Essays in Honor of William E. Dodd (University of Chicago Press, 1935). Nixon describes it as having both "kinship and discrepancy" with his previous writings. His claim to authority is personal:
My ideas or observations must speak for themselves. I offer them for whatever merit they may have, relying on the country woman’s dictum, 'What I am, I am, and nobody can’t make me no ammer.'" (v)
--Jeff Ward, This Public Address
Fine- in Very Good dust jacket; typical tanning to boards; tiny bit of fraying crown and base of spine; price in pencil ffep; jacket complete but with small chips and tears at extremities; slight loss (1/2") crown of spine and 1" rear panel. |
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