California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and the Making of a New Deal Narrative

California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and the Making of a New Deal Narrative. By Jan Goggans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. xvi, 345 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-520-26621-6.)

Paul Taylor was an economist who pioneered the study of agricultural economics. Dorothea Lange was a photographer whose pictorial images of the Great Depression and her outspoken feminist views made her a celebrity. Taylor worked in anonymity and Lange in the public eye. They met in 1934, divorced their spouses, and married. Their thirty-year marriage became one of the enduring intellectual love stories of the twentieth century. In 1 939 their book, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, was a pathbreaking collaboration between a social scientist and a brilliant photojournalist. The pictorial images as well as the text drove...