Wild Pilgrimage

Two monochrome images. The left, in black, depicts a man from behind sawing wood, and the right, in orange, a man in the woods emerging from the water, directing himself toward a nude female who lies on the ground in the distance.
Wild Pilgrimage alternates between the protagonist's reality (in black) and fantasy (in orange).

Wild Pilgrimage is the third wordless novel of American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985), published in 1932. It was executed in 108 monochromatic wood engravings, printed alternately in black ink when representing reality and orange to represent the protagonist's fantasies. The story tells of a factory worker who abandons his workplace to seek a free life; on his travels he witnesses a lynching, assaults a farmer's wife, educates himself with a hermit, and upon returning to the factory leads an unsuccessful workers' revolt. The protagonist finds himself battling opposing dualities such as freedom versus responsibility, the individual versus society, and love versus death.

Ward simplified his approach after the more complex, novelistic story of his previous book, Madman's Drum (1930), returning to the simplicity of his first, Gods' Man (1929). Wild Pilgrimage achieves more fluid pacing and varied imagery than the first two books, incorporating the influence of art movements such as American Regionalism and Futurism.