HOOKER, Adrienne (designer; after John Steinbeck).
Perseverance: A Graphic Novel of The Grapes of Wrath.
FIRST EDITION, one of only 50 copies, signed by Hooker. Louisiana: Triumph Over Tragedy Steering Committee, [2009].
A handmade artist's book produced under a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Big Read grant. Adrienne Hooker, then Assistant Professor of Art at Louisiana Tech University, worked with eighth-grade students from 21 Louisiana parishes to create graphic-novel adaptations of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The program — "From Tragedy to Triumph: The Great Depression and New Deal in North Louisiana" — set out, in its organizers' words, to "honor those who lived through this transformative period and to demonstrate how the landscape of our country was quite literally changed by the recovery efforts, both public and private."
The result is a genuine cross-category object: an artist's book, hand-produced in a tiny edition by a university art program; a primary document of a federally funded arts-education project; and a Steinbeck-association item, the source novel reinterpreted by a new generation of student artists seventy years after its 1939 publication. The book combines student collage, drawing, and photography with handmade paper leaves, the text set in Eric Gill's Perpetua. One of just fifty copies, signed by Hooker. Editions of this kind, hand-produced in small numbers through a single school program, rarely reach the rare-book trade. A near fine copy.
SKU TO-2026-083
