Avoiding the Tumbrils, with Jerome Zerbe

“Zerbe has always been puzzled by the fact that throughout the grim period of the Depression the sorely beset poor and even the unemployed seemed to take pleasure in pictures of the rich squandering their unearned incomes upon frivolity. ‘I’d have expected my pictures to make people furious,’ he has said. ‘They had the opposite effect. My friends and I were all more or less Marie Antoinettes in our attitudes, but instead of having our heads chopped off, we were applauded.’”
 
Brendan Gill, Happy Times

"Happy Times"

Lucius Beebe and Friends Enjoying the Depression; Photograph by Jerome Zerbe

​Image Credit: Happy Times

​A copy of Happy Times signed by Jerome Zerbe and Brendan Gill is available via the Nick Harvill Libraries store.