[3] He named his son after the rural town of Lyndhurst, located in the south coastal county of Hampshire, where he had lived for two years as a teenager prior to his emigration.

In the hope of improving his health, the family moved to Oak Park, Illinois, where his father became a pastor at the Euclid Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church.

[8] After four months in eastern Europe, the couple settled in Leipzig, Germany for a year, where Ward studied as a special one-year student at the National Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookmaking [de].

In 1928, his first commissioned work illustrated Dorothy Rowe's The Begging Deer: And Other Stories of Japanese Children with eight full-page watercolor and forty-two ink and brush drawings.

The first American wordless novel, Gods' Man, was published by Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith that October, the week before the Wall Street Crash of 1929; over the next four years, it sold more than 20,000 copies in six editions.

[15] During the 1970s, Ward worked on an ambitious wordless novel, tentatively titled Dance of the Hours, which at his death consisted of 77 woodblocks in various stages of completion.

Every facet of the book, such as the paper, type fonts and vignettes, grew out of the collaborative decisions of a small group of writers, artists and editors, and represented an affirmation of handwork.

The 94-minute documentary, culled from over seven hours of film and narrated by Maglaras, premiered at Penn State University Library's, Foster Auditorium, on April 20, 2012, where it was warmly received.

Ward's first work, Gods' Man (1929), uses a blend of Art Deco and Expressionist styles to tell the story of an artist's struggle with his craft, his seduction and subsequent abuse by money and power, his escape to innocence, and his unavoidable doom.

Ward, in employing the concept of the wordless pictorial narrative, acknowledged as his predecessors the European artists Frans Masereel and Otto Nückel.

Released the week of the 1929 stock market crash, Gods' Man would continue to exert influence well beyond the Depression era, becoming an important source of inspiration for Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg.

In 1930 and 1931, Ward created a series of striking wood-engraved illustrations for Alec Waugh's pair of travel books, Hot Countries and Most Women, and in the following year a number of line-cut chapter headings and a provocative dust-jacket image that embodied the homoerotic themes of Myron Brinig's satirical novel, The Flutter of an Eyelid.

In 1934, he executed illustrations and vignettes for a new edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which were influenced by James Whale’s famous 1931 film starring Boris Karloff.

And in the late thirties and early forties, he produced color illustrations for three classic novels brought out by the Heritage Press: Les Misérables (1938), Beowulf (1939) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1941).

These beautifully made engravings focus on rural scenes celebrating the fertility of nature, the joy of children as they explore the outdoors, and political allegories like Two Men Waiting (1966), Mars, Venus and Snare (1968) and Victim (1970).

Perhaps sensing the hypnotic spell cast by the increasingly precise and textured line-work of his prints, Ward returned to his earlier sequential art in his last, unfinished novel.

Previous winners of the Lynd Ward Prize—given in recognition of the best graphic novel or comic book, fiction or nonfiction, published in the previous calendar year by a living US or Canadian citizen or resident—have been Nick Sousanis, Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki, Jim Woodring, Chris Ware, Anders Nilsen, Adam Hines, Nora Krug, Travis Dandro, and Emil Ferris.