Drawing for newspapers and books
Grant was born in San Francisco in 1875. As a boy he travelled by sailing ship around Cape Horn to attend school in Scotland, a voyage that became an important part of accounts of his later interest in the sea. He went on to study at the Heatherly and Lambeth art schools in London before returning to the United States.
His early employment belonged to the world of illustrated journalism. He worked for San Francisco newspapers and then for publications in New York. Assignments included reporting through drawings, and he covered the Boer War for Harper’s Weekly. He also worked for Puck, developing a career in which images had to communicate character, action and setting within the demands of a printed page.
Book illustration continued alongside his journalism. The held Scarlet Plague credits Jack London as author and Grant as illustrator. Grant’s images interpret the characters and events of London’s story.
Giving The Scarlet Plague a visual form
The held volume carries the Macmillan title page dated 1915. Its opening follows an elderly survivor and a boy through a landscape where vegetation has overrun a former railway. Later, the old man recalls the epidemic and the collapse of the society he knew. Grant’s pictures make the contrast between remembered civilization and precarious survival visible.
The frontispiece places a group of dark human silhouettes against the glare of a burning city. Dense lines spread upward through the sky, while the figures remain small and nearly featureless. The composition gives the disaster an overwhelming scale without needing a detailed portrait of any one victim.
