"The Bunyan tall tale gets felled." -- Kirkus STARRED REVIEW and a feature in NYT!

“What do you do when you find out that a story you loved as a kid is a tall tale spun by an advertising man intent on justifying the clear-cutting of our ancestral lands by lumber companies?” —Lee Francis IV, foreword.

Lumberjacks—big men with big appetites and bigger axes like Big Joe Mufferaw, Otto Walta, and George Knox—frequently starred in tales told on long winter nights in the logging camps of nineteenth century America. The story of Paul Bunyan, the most legendary lumberjack of them all, crossed over into the mainstream and has been a childhood staple for more than a century. But few people realize, even today, that Bunyan and his faithful blue ox were the product of a logging industry marketing campaign.

In Paul Bunyan: The Invention of an American Legend​, cartoonist Noah Van Sciver heads back to Minnesota in 1914 to uncover the creation of an American myth. The book takes place during a snowy train journey, when W. B. Laughead, a real-life advertising impresario employed by Minnesota’s Red River Timber Company, spins a yarn for his fellow travelers. In Laughead’s hands, a regional folk figure grows tall enough to touch the clouds, becoming the star of a colorful tale of frontier life that has obscured, for too long, the logging industry’s wholesale devastation of the region’s old-growth forests and its role in the systematic dispossession of Native peoples from their land and way of life.

​★​★​★ "Readers will come away ready to question what other falsehoods they’ve been fed about the history of marginalized people . . . ​An accessible and important reminder of how easily the truth can be coopted."
–Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW

LEE FRANCIS IV is the Executive Director of Native Realities, an Indigenous Imagination organization that seeks to engage and inspire Indigenous youth and communities through pop culture media and culturally dynamic programming. Dr. Francis also founded the Indigenous Comic Con (now IndigiPop Expo) and opened Red Planet Books and Comics, the first Native comic shop in the world, in 2017. He received his Ph.D. in Education from Texas State University and currently resides in North Carolina with his family.

DR. DEONDRE SMILES is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada. He is of Ojibwe, Black, and Swedish descent and is a proud citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. Dr. Smiles's interests are many and include Indigenous geographies, human-environment interactions, and Indigenous cultural resource management and preservation. He serves as the principal investigator for the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, one of Western Canada’s first Indigenous geographies-focused labs.

For more information on ordering Paul Bunyan for your library, store or classroom, check it out on Edelweiss​!