In 1955 and 1956, supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, Robert Frank traveled across the United States photographing the reality behind a self-satisfied nation with a handheld 35mm camera and a foreigner’s skeptical appraisal of what he saw. His distinctive photographic style, with its skewed perspectives and obstructed views, imitated the way we so often experience the world and represented a break from the more straightforward “just-the-facts-ma’am” style of his mentor Walker Evans. A small selection of images from the 767 rolls of film that Frank shot during his yearlong road trip found its public in book form as The Americans, published in France in 1958 and in the United States the following year with an introduction by the Beat poet Jack Kerouac. Although derided at first in this country for both its style and what some saw as its anti-American content, The Americans ultimately proved to be one of the most influential photobooks of the century.

Frank found himself in Los Angeles at the end of 1955 and the following February photographed behind the scenes in Holly-wood, where postwar America crafted an image of itself that was quite different from the alienation, angst, and loneliness that Frank had found in the cities and towns he had driven through en route to the West Coast. Hume Cronyn, Arthur Treacher, Peter Lorre, Buddy Baer, and Bonita Granville, all pictured here, starred in the February 9, 1956, episode of the CBS Climax! series, a light comedy titled “The Fifth Wheel” set in fictional small-town America.