The Great Migration: An American Story (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

by Jacob Lawrence, Walter Dean Myers (With)

Overview

A series of paintings chronicles the journey of African Americans who, like the artist's family, left the rural South in the early 20th-century to find a better life in the industrial North.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780785776284
Publisher:	Perfection Learning Corporation
Publication date:	04/04/2019
Edition description:	THIS EDITION IS INTENDED FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY
Pages:	48
Product dimensions:	10.69(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.31(d)
Lexile:	830L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Jacob Lawrence is a prominent American painter whose career spans six decades. He is known for several sequences of narrative paintings, including "Harriet Tubman" and "Frederick Douglass." Lawrence is the illustrator of Harriet in the Promised Land, a picture book. He is Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Editorial Reviews

This stirring picture book (published in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection) brings together the 60 panels of Lawrence's epic narrative "Migration" series, which he created in the years 1940-41. They tell of the journey of African Americans who left their homes in the South around the time of World War I and traveled in search of work and better lives in the northern industrial cities. Lawrence is a storyteller with words as well as pictures: his captions and his own 1992 introduction to this book are the best commentary on his work. "To me, migration means movement," he says, and the rhythmic pictures show people--alone and together--leaving, walking, waiting, working, traveling the route to possibility. The sequence isn't linear; as in family stories, the pictures keep circling back to what they left behind. The story is both personal and elemental: Lawrence heard about the migration from his own family, and the paintings have an immediacy that pulls you right into the frames, so that you feel you're there with the child in line at the railway station or with the woman in a tenement reading a letter from home. The repeated motifs in simple shapes and bright primary colors express the common history of ordinary people; the refrain "and the migrants kept coming" still applies today. A poem at the end by Walter Dean Myers also reveals the universal in the particulars of the "small rope-tied case" and the "food that will not last the long journey." Older readers may want to go from this book to the large-size reproductions and the essays in the adult art book "Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series". Many will want to see the exhibition of these paintings that is currently touring the country.

Hazel Rochman