The story of Henry Fonda, both on screen and off, is the story of the United States. It’s a story of democratic yearnings and violent shortcomings, traceable not only in the actor’s legendary portrayals of pioneering settler (Drums Along the Mohawk), migrant sharecropper (The Grapes of Wrath), gullible heir (The Lady Eve), and president (Young Mr. Lincoln, Fail-Safe), but also in his own life as the descendant of a Dutch family in pre-colonial New York, and as a witness to watershed events of the 20th century: the Omaha Race Riots of 1919, the war in the Pacific, the civil rights struggle, and the ascendance of another actor, Ronald Reagan, at the climax of the Cold War. “His face is a picture of opposites in conflict,” John Steinbeck once remarked, and indeed Fonda, perhaps more than any other actor of his generation, brought a sense of moral anguish to nearly every role he played, whether victims of injustice (You Only Live Once, The Wrong Man), or messengers of salvation (My Darling Clementine, 12 Angry Men) and terror (The Ox-Bow Incident, Once Upon a Time in the West). Tracing the entwined, complex trajectories of an actor and his nation in Hollywood movie clips, recorded interviews, and a cross-country pilgrimage to significant landmarks, Alexander Horwath—together with Michael Palm and Regina Schlagnitweit—has created a magisterial work of cultural history.
