This 45-minute biographical documentary introduces viewers to the little-known history of American illustration, and to a mostly unheralded illustrator whose iconic renderings of adventurous life help define American popular culture at the start of the 20th century.

Frank Schoonover illustrated more than 150 classic books and hundreds of the great illustrated magazines of the day. More than five million readers every month saw his illustrations of the fiction of Jack London and Zane Grey. And he was the first to visualize the legendary western character Hopalong Cassidy.

Dramatic reenactments shot in wilderness regions of Wyoming, the Canadian North and the Delaware River in eastern Pennsylvania are underscored with the music of Aaron Copeland Appalachian Spring to entertainingly recreate the subjects Frank Schoonover loved first - horses and dogsleds, buckskins and snowshoes, holsters and knives, prairie grass and ice.

But Frank Schoonover’s creative vision transcended the pop culture mandates he and contemporaries such as Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth obliged. Schoonover’s moody monochromatic sketches of boys toiling in coal mines and girls laboring in textile mills are visionary social commentary that reinforces how art can be a catalyst of social change.

Frank Schoonover’s rapture with life itself inspired his passion for authenticity, which envisioned both America’s wistful recollection of itself, and our relentless aspiration of a more perfect union.