A Study Guide for Gordon Parks's "The Learning Tree"
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A Study Guide for Gordon Parks's "The Learning Tree" - Gale
10
The Learning Tree
Gordon Parks
1963
Introduction
The Learning Tree is a 1963 novel about an African American family, the Wingers, living in rural Kansas in the 1920s. The book is centered on the experiences of Newt Winger, the youngest son, a young man who wants to go to college and achieve great things, even though he is told to expect his life to amount to little. Over the course of three years, Newt has his first experiences with death, sex, love, and terror. He sees cruelty and compassion, and he witnesses more violent events than readers would think possible. The racial divide that was so much a part of American life at the time is not prominent in all of the sorrows and joys that these characters experience, but it is always an element in the Wingers' lives.
Newt Winger's story is based on the life of the novel's author, Gordon Parks, who grew up under very similar circumstances. By the time the book was published, Parks had become the artistic success that Newt dreams about, having become an award-winning photographer and professional musician. When The Learning Tree, his first published novel, was made into a movie in 1968, Parks wrote the screenplay himself, composed the soundtrack, and directed it, becoming the first African American to direct a major Hollywood movie.
Author Biography
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas. He was the youngest of fifteen children. His father was a tenant farmer. When his mother died in 1928, Parks went to live with his sister in St. Paul, Minnesota, but his brother-in-law soon forced him to leave, and he was on his own at age sixteen. He slept in railroad cars and attended school briefly before dropping out, then worked several menial jobs, such as waiter and busboy. Those jobs introduced him to musicians, and Parks taught himself to play the piano. He worked as a musician in a brothel and then toured with a dance band, which broke up in New York City in 1933. There, Parks worked for the government in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
In 1933, he married Sally Alvis and moved to Minnesota, where they raised three children. Parks worked as a railroad porter, and on a stop in Chicago he visited the Art Institute and developed an interest in photography. He bought a camera and moved his family to Chicago, eventually making a name for himself as a photographer. In 1941, he won a Julius Rosenwald fellowship for his photography.
Parks worked as a photographer for a few government agencies until, in 1948, he was hired as a staff photographer by Life magazine, starting a relationship with the magazine that would continue over the next twenty-four years.
In the 1950s, Parks became involved in film and television production. He divorced