Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936)

Scarlett O’Hara’s first encounter with Rhett Butler is an April picnic at the Wilkes family’s Twelve Oaks plantation. It’s only days before the Civil War begins in Charleston, South Carolina (April 12, 1861), and the picnickers are oblivious to...

Lynn Riggs’s Cherokee Night (1936)

Riggs’s campfire picnic is atop Claremore Mound, a barren hill, 785 high that juts up from the flat landscape that was the scene of a battle between the Cherokees and the Osages. “At the right and forward, a fire burns. Three couples–boys and...

Dylan Thomas’s “The Orchards” (1936)

Thomas’s “The Orchards” is a nightmare. It’s a death-in-life story about Marlais, a blocked writer who meets spectral women, demon-lovers, at a horrible picnic. The narrative begins when Marlais contemplates suicide but instead is summoned by...

C.F. Leyel’s Picnics for Motorists (1936)

Leyel’s Picnic for Motorists is designed for an emerging market linking the joy of picnics with the pleasure of motoring. “There are many people with cars who make a regular habit of spending Saturday or Sunday in the country,” Leyel trills, “with a hamper of food,...

Ilse Martha Bischoff’s Picnic on a River (1937)

Bischoff’s Picnic on the River is a scene that alludes to a happy time. The picnic cloth is well-stocked with a wicker basket, and wine and food are surrounded by picnickers of all ages. The central character is the woman in yellow sitting beside the recumbent woman...

Aleksandr Gerasimov’s Collective Farm Harvest Festival (1937)

Gerasimov’s celebration of a very abundant harvest is propaganda. Soviet farms were not producing well, and the nation suffered chronic harvest shortages. Stalin’s propaganda program deemed otherwise, and the artists and writers were instructed to portray a land of...

Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume’s Recipe for Sausage Rolls in The Constance Spry Cookery Book (1937)

In “Picnics and Outdoor Meals,” Spry writes, “The nicest outdoor meals are those cooked on the spot,” and among the best are barbecues.” She does not like “grand picnics,” the kind for which everything is transported and served by staff. “This is not the best way to...

Ben Shahn’s Sunday School Picnic (1937)

Shahn’s Sunday School Picnic, Ponderosa Homesteads, North Carolina (1937); http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8a17327/ For a contrast, see The Bad Seed.

Lee Miller’s Picnic [Ile Sainte-Marguerite] (1937)

Miller’s Picnic (1937) is a photograph lovers’s gossip. At the time, Miller seemed to think of it as just another snapshot, but it’s now among her best sellers. In the summer of 1937, Miller and Roland Penrose, her lover, lived in Mougins, a village above Cannes near...

Sherwood King’s If I Die Before I Wake has no picnic(1938)

Sherwood King’s If I Die Before I Wake does not have a picnic episode. Orson Welles, however, invents one for The Lady from Shanghai, It’s a powerful unpicnicky story told by Michael O’Hara, the protagonist, about a shark frenzy and its awful...