A Woody Guthrie notebook page, Coney Island, 1947.

1939年3月，Woody Guthrie将歌词键入了一首歌曲，他只是想到了 - “哦，哦，宝贝，你不知道吗？我是一个返回“农场” - 然后打回车率大约十几次并写道：

我想看到这里有一些好的步骤

And illystrate all of my emptry spaces with some

正确的良好自由和倒退的侧面

And crisscrosspatches and touchy hatches and

Then blend and shade it in with some crossy hatching worth

Looking at.

After a moment he added: “Sounds so good I might jump in here and do my own iullstrating and capustricating.”

只要他一直在弥补和唱歌歌曲，Guthrie就已经绘制和绘画。他的草图和水彩画是一种终身的终身视觉日记，具有巨大的品种和生命力，并混合政治动画片，色情涂鸦，街景和梦想家。通常是他的口头和视觉艺术同在同一页面上，每种表达方式都在另一个表达式中扩展，因此不可能说这些单词是否是图片的标题，或者图片的说明。

In 1946, Guthrie—just discharged from the army and newly married to his second wife, Marjorie Mazia—set up house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. There, far from the Oklahoma that had shaped him but secure in the bosom of his new family (his mother-in-law, the Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt, lived around the corner), he embarked on one of his most productive periods. Guthrie’s passion for his family and their seaside bohemian life animates the work of his Coney Island years, from which the writings and drawings here are taken, with a goofy vigor. “Blintzes and cheeses / Knishes and spam / Go Coney Island / Roll on the sand,” he wrote, and, “It ain’t the people here along the beach that’s ugly. It’s these dernfool crazy bathing suits they got on.” At the same time, family tragedy—the death of Guthrie and Mazia’s firstborn child, Cathy Ann, in an apartment fire in February of 1947, suffuses his pages with a brooding darkness and despair.

Mazia忙哒ncer in Martha Graham’s company, and Guthrie spent long stretches looking after the kids—sitting on the floor with them surrounded by the cheap construction paper, crayons, chalk and paints he picked up at Sam & Dave’s Corner Store. He had a habit of building songs around his children’s remarks, and his Coney Island journals are full of such evocative phrases as “I don’t feel welcome at your table of big long words,” that might be the utterances of a preschooler of the fruit of his own lyric gift. Guthrie’s voice had always swung between playfulness and profundity, and he remained engaged in the world of politics, whether by devoting an entire notebook to an illustrated letter of protest at a landlord’s “no children” policy or by expressing his fear of nuclear proliferation to President Truman on the letterhead he picked up at one of his wife’s teaching gigs.

Guthrie was just thirty-four when he settled in Coney Island, and he lived there for only four years, but it was the last period in which he enjoyed the full scope of his powers before his long, slow decline in the grip of Huntington’s disease. Hundreds of the pages he filled there now reside at the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives in Manhattan. Like the songs for which he remains best known, these works on paper are full of freewheeeling, hot-blooded, irreverent wit and big-hearted intelligence. As the man himself suggested, nobody could illustrate Guthrie better than Guthrie.

1949年担任总统的一封信。