Thanks to famous documentary photographs of Americans during the Great Depression, we tend to visualize everything that happened in the 1930s in black-and-white. In fact, Kodachrome first became available in the U.S. in 1935, and several photographers for the Farm Security Administration experimented with the new color film as they traveled across the country. Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43 presents an oddly startling world of small towns and country roads ablaze in the vivid hues of real life. A sunburned family in Pie Town, New Mexico, eat a dinner of homemade biscuits, grits, and gravy. Sisters wearing print dresses all made from the same rose and blue fabric seem dazed at the wonders of a state fair in Vermont. Work horses graze on bright green grass under a moody Kansas sky. Chosen from an archive of about 1,600 vintage color slides, the 175 photos in the book are the work of several documentary photographers, including Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano. Partway through this panorama of Americana, the tone and subject matter shift. Suddenly, the U.S. is at war, and the casual, unposed quality of the earlier images shifts into self-conscious glorification of the American war effort by the Office of War Information, with shots of steel mills and train yards, and of women newly hired by factories to assemble bomber parts. It's clear from Paul Hendrickson's engaging introduction that the pre-war images are the ones he finds most captivating. This slender volume--which aptly borrows the title of Dustbowl troubadour Woody Guthrie's autobiography--offers a window on a distant era in which grinding poverty and racial segregation coexist with the simple pleasures of rural and small-town life. —Cathy Curtis

From Publishers Weekly
Taken from 1939 to 1943 under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, these 175 "lost" photos feature shots by Russell Lee, Andreas Feininger and Marion Post Wolcott, using the then-revolutionary technology of Kodachrome film. Color photographs taken before 1939 have largely deteriorated, so these surviving photos are later than the most familiar b&w Depression-era shots. This 11¾"×8½" volume thus "colorizes" one's normally black-and-white impressions of a very vibrant time, as Hendrickson (Sons of Mississippi) notes in his introduction. The logic behind the arrangement of the photos, which at first seems largely random, as it follows neither photographer, location nor chronology, becomes clear by the end of the book: the U.S.'s industrial rise. Images of urban lethargy and farmhands picking cotton under hot blue skies (the unbearable conditions of cotton-picking somehow seem more apparent in color) gradually give way to images of mobility, mechanization and a changing economy. Arnold T. Palmer's gleaming portraits of Rosie the riveter–like aircraft workers follow Jack Delano's earthier photos of male railroad workers, their sweaty and intent faces caked with soot. Tellingly, the book ends with photos of bombers flying over California.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
More barely known, invaluable early-1940s photos come to complement Angelo Spinelli and Lewis Carlson's Life behind Barbed Wire [BKL Mr 15 03] and Evan Bachner's At Ease [BKL My 15 03]. But whereas those books reveal sparsely documented aspects of World War II servicemen's lives, this one shows mostly civilians in examples of the color work done for the Farm Service Administration (FSA) and its successor, the Office of War Information. FSA, in particular, is a byword for documentary photographic excellence because of the agency's documentation of the Depression by photographers famously including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. But those pictures are black and white, and many may not even know that color film was exposed for the FSA. So these images by FSA stalwarts Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and others constitute manna from the archives. Affectionately and analytically introduced by journalist Paul Hendrickson, they show farm people and rural life in far-flung corners of the U.S., then urban workers and workplaces, then wartime work and workers. Masterly and powerful as their monochrome siblings, they are as complexly delightful, not least because they boost the documentary reputation of the most popular painter of their time, Norman Rockwell; the faces in the photos look just like those in his paintings. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
The photographs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which recorded American life in the late 1930s and early 1940s, remain among the most moving and famous documentary images from the first half of the 20th century. Yet few people know that, along with thousands and thousands of black-and-white photographs, the FSA photographers also took color pictures. Here, for the first time, is a selection of the best of the FSA color photographs-introduced by National Book Award finalist Paul Hendrickson and assembled to create a vivid portrait of America as it emerged from the Great Depression to fight World War II. Covering countryside and city, farm and factory, work and play, the images in this book open a window onto our national experience from 1939 to 1943, revealing a world that we have always seen in our mind's eye exclusively in black and white. Never before has there been a book that paints this picture in full color. Published in association with the Library of Congress.

About the Author
Paul Hendrickson, a longtime feature writer for the Washington Post, now teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, and the recent Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy. He lives in Philadelphia.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The photographs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which recorded American life in the late 1930s and early 1940s, remain among the most moving and famous documentary images from the first half of the 20th century. Yet few people know that, along with thousands and thousands of black-and-white photographs, the FSA photographers also took color pictures. Here, for the first time, is a selection of the best of the FSA color photographs-introduced by National Book Award finalist Paul Hendrickson and assembled to create a vivid portrait of America as it emerged from the Great Depression to fight World War II.Covering countryside and city, farm and factory, work and play, the images in this book open a window onto our national experience from 1939 to 1943, revealing a world that we have always seen in our mind's eye exclusively in black and white. Never before has there been a book that paints this picture in full color. Published in association with the Library of Congress. Author Bio: Paul Hendrickson, a longtime feature writer for the Washington Post, now teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, and the recent Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy. He lives in Philadelphia.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly