In today’s post, UW Press book designer Dustin Kilgore describes the process of designing the new cover for Carlos Bulosan’s memoir, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History. The book, first published in 1943, describes Bulosan’s boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West. As Marilyn C. Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi point out in their new introduction, the book “still stands today as both an indictment of twentieth-century American imperialist designs overseas and a testament condemning a pre–World War II domestic regime of racialized class warfare.” Nevertheless, Bulosan maintained hope that America would provide new opportunities and he came to love it as his home. Here, Kilgore explains how he wrangled these complexities in designing the cover of the new 2014 edition of the book.

Prior to the 2014 reissue, the most recent edition of America Is in the Heart was published by the University of Washington Press in 1973 and featured a 1946 illustration by Frances O’Brien from the cover of the Saturday Review of Literature. When the design was reduced in size for the 1973 book cover, the shadows on Bulosan’s face appeared heavier than in the original illustration. This problem was exacerbated in subsequent reprintings, ultimately resulting in a heavily shaded, somewhat sinister-looking illustration of Bulosan. The determined look in Bulosan’s eyes in the original O’Brien illustration became almost glowering as the quality of the illustration was degraded over time.

The original Frances O’Brien portrait of Bulosan as it appeared on a 1946 cover of The Saturday Review of Literature (left) and the degraded, heavily shadowed illustration on the cover of the 1973 edition of “America Is in the Heart” (right).

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