About the Author

R. Tripp Evans is Professor of Art History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. He is the author of Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915 (2004). He received his doctoral degree in the history of art from Yale University and has served as a visiting lecturer at Yale, Wellesley College, and Brown University. He and his partner, Ed Cabral, live in Providence, Rhode Island.

Reviews

Winner of The Marfield Prize: The National Award for Arts Writing

"[Written] with verve, nuance and the excitement of discovery. . . a fascinating, audacious and empathic portrait."
—Donna Seaman, Kansas City Star
  
“Evans provides Wood and his work with layers upon layers of depth, creating a portrait of a fully realized, three-dimensional man whose work and life is fascinating and distinctly American.”
—Dustin Michael Harris, Chicago Sun-Times

“Absorbing and thoughtful… Evans dismisses the artist’s folksy declarations and devotion to Regionalism as a mere cover, an expedient camouflage, for his tortured private life.”  
—Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Book Review

“Sumptuous, eminently readable…” 
 —Sam Coale, The Providence Journal

“Evans’s in-depth, gendered readings of Wood’s paintings situate him in the longer history of male artists’ gendered self-portrayals (bracketed by Oscar Wilde and Jackson Pollock), providing a useful new insight into Wood’s place in American art.”
 —Publishers Weekly

"This audacious, ingenious and powerful book blows the lid off the study of Grant Wood, the creator of America’s best-known work of art, aptly titled American Gothic. Evans frankly acknowledges Wood’s homosexuality, which earlier biographers avoided entirely, and mines layer upon layer of meaning in his fascinating paintings that earlier writers completely missed. This is certainly one of the best and most psychologically penetrating studies ever written on an American artist, but it’s more than that. It is a book that transforms our understanding of what goes on in the American heartland—and of the swirling currents and undercurrents of American life."
—Henry Adams, author of Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock.

"A fascinating and heartrending portrait of an artist forced to sacrifice his right to happiness and wholeness."
—Booklist (starred)