For the last several years Douglas Brinkley has been working on a massive illustrated narrative, The American Heritage New History of the United States, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster. This essay is adapted from the introduction.

After considering literally hundreds of images for the dust jacket of my new American history, I selected Grant Wood’s fantasy farmscape Stone City. Although most Americans know Wood, a native of Iowa, for his famous 1930 painting American Gothic, permanently housed at the Art Institute of Chicago but regularly reproduced on everything from corn-flakes boxes to computer commercials, he was in fact a prolific student of the faces of America. The model for the stern, steely-eyed woman in American Gothic was Wood’s sister Nan; the overalls-clad gentleman with the pitchfork was his dentist, Dr. B. H. McKeeby. Exhibited in Chicago shortly after it was completed, the painting was declared a masterpiece and its creator recognized as one of the regionalists who—along with Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry—could lead the American Midwest out of its so-called provincial stupor. Yet Wood was also forced to explain to New York critics that American Gothic was never meant to be a realistic portrait of Iowa farmers. “The people in American Gothic are not farmers but are small-town, as the shirt on the man indicates,” he said. “They are American, however, and it is unfair to localize them to Iowa.”

Equally unfair is the way Grant has been treated by the highbrow art world since his death in 1942. In the October 1983 issue of The New Criterion, the periodical’s founder-editor Hilton Kramer attacked Wood as “phony,” calling his paintings “trashy” and his stock-in-trade “fakery.” Yet I believe it was Kramer who was removed from the lives of ordinary Americans—and thus failed to appreciate that Wood was actually conducting a sardonic revolt against the cities, stylizing farmscapes and Midwesterners to keep the American dream alive during the Great Depression; the painter was celebrating the agrarian myth and lampooning it at the same time. But Wood, who had himself lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, also agreed with Daniel Webster that “when tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.” Wood even painted a mural for the Iowa State University library titled When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow.

Using the agricultural landscape fantasy Stone City on the cover of the History of the United States is my revenge on Hilton Kramer for calling the ingenious Grant Wood a “shallow, hapless artist.” Kramer would have had Wood paint angst-ridden realistic portraits of the misery of farm labor, all calloused hands and manure heaps, wretched droughts and insect plagues. Instead, in Stone City Wood offered a bucolic Midwestern dreamscape, and the working farmers of America embraced it with old-fashioned pragmatism, a nod, and a