Michael McCurdy

My mother has sent me a copy of Toward the Light, a collection of wood engravings by Michael McCurdy. The book was published in 1982 by The Porcupine’s Quill in Ontario. Though most of McCurdy’s work illustrates the text of others, this book was simply a showcase for some of the exceptional work he had already done by the age of forty. (This bull, which illustrated a story by Flannery O’Connor, appears in Toward the Light. It must be a favorite, because it is still featured on McCurdy’s home page.)

McCurdy, a long-time resident of Massachusetts, produced a series of notecards for the Thoreau Society, and according to his website his current projects include “an unnamed project in rhyme ... featuring 26 drawings for an alphabet book that deals mainly with the animals found at Walden Pond in the time of Thoreau.”