DESCRIPTION: Lange and Taylor work on their book, An American Exodus. Lange lays out the images, section by section, in pairs like facing book pages. Then, together, they compose captions and text to tell the larger story they had been following since 1935: of rural families rendered landless and homeless by mechanized agriculture, their plight aggravated by drought, their exodus to California, and their transformation from independent owners and tenant farmers into agricultural laborers for hire. In December, Dorothea Lange had written to Roy Stryker, her boss at the Farm Security Administration in Washington, D.C., to ask permission “to take a day off now and then...to work on it.” “I see no reason why you couldn’t take out a little time now and then….The book is important, and will benefit us all,” he had replied.