Book Talk: The Couple with the Pitchfork by Wanda Corn

The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon is the capstone of Wanda M. Corn’s long career. An historian of American art and culture, she draws upon five decades of research and her vast personal collection of American Gothic ephemera. The first half of her book tells the story behind the creation of the painting, its purchase by the Art Institute of Chicago, and the many ways intellectuals and the public responded to it during Grant Wood’s lifetime (1891-1942). In the second half, Corn tracks the couple’s emergence as an icon in the 1960s, closely surveying the innumerable versions of the couple created by pop artists and commercial designers, political cartoonists and grassroot reenactors. She explains why the couple today is one of the most recognized and reworked twosomes in all of image history.  

Wanda Corn is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University and has been the recipient of numerous awards for her teaching and scholarship. As a guest museum curator, she has produced many books and exhibitions, including The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1990-1910 (1972); The Art of Andrew Wyeth (l973); Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983); and Seeing Gertrude Stein, Five Stories (2011-12). Her widely acclaimed Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, published in 2017 by Prestel Press, won Honorable Mention for the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award and was awarded the 2018 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award.  The book accompanied a traveling exhibition that included not only works of art but examples of the artist’s clothes and photographs of her distinctive style of modeling for the great photographers of the twentieth century. Another of Corn’s works, a study of avant-garde modernist culture along the Atlantic rim, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and American Identity, 1915-35, was published by the University of California Press in 1999 and won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. In 2011, the same press published her Women Building History, which dealt with Mary Cassatt and the decorative program of murals and sculptures for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. 

Corn earned her PhD from New York University and was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Bates College. She currently serves on the board of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art and the advisory committee for the Grant Wood Art Colony at the University of Iowa. Since 2000, she has chaired the Advisory Committee for Historic Artist Homes and Studios, an affiliate of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In retirement she lives, writes, and gardens on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In 2018, she received a Public Scholars grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to underwrite a year of work on The Couple with the Pitchfork, published by Princeton University Press in October 2026. For further information, see https://art.stanford.edu/people/wanda-corn 

The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon will be available for purchase in the Museum Shop late fall.

Cancellation Policy: A one-week advance notice is required to receive a refund.