The most famous farming couple in American history may not be a couple at all. The man with the pitchfork was Grant Wood's family dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, the woman was Wood's sister Nan, and her apron was trimmed with rickrack torn from their mother's discarded dresses. This episode reveals how a hurried sketch of a flimsy Carpenter Gothic house in Eldon, Iowa, in August 1930 became one of the most parodied and misunderstood images of the 20th century.

We examine how Wood, trained in the avant-garde scenes of Paris and Munich, treated the painting like a film production, posing his models separately in a Cedar Rapids studio and echoing the Gothic window in the pitchfork tines and overall stitching. East Coast critics read it as satire, Iowans sent hate mail, and then the deepening Great Depression flipped its meaning into a symbol of pi ...