Is there anyone who has not seen the sturdy Iowa farmer with his pitchfork and his thin-lipped wife or daughter?
Ever since it met the public eye in 1930, the work titled American Gothic has elicited admiration, disgust, reverence, and ridicule - and has been reproduced hundreds of thousands of times, in every medium. With broad perspective, acute insight, and humor, Steven Biel explores the strangely enduring life of America's most popular painting.
