It is July 1931.

Nineteen-year-old New York art student Jackson Pollock is writing to a friend about his cross-country hitchhiking trip home to Los Angeles for the summer.

Evidence of the country’s slide into economic depression was everywhere to be seen.

For this budding artist, the three-week trip is a joyful immersion in ‘local color.’

“My trip was a peach.

I got a number of kicks in the butt and put in jail twice with days of hunger, but what a worthwhile experience.

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