The first Hollywood studio film directed by an African American, The Learning Tree is Gordon Parks’s semiautobiographical portrait of black youth in Depression-era Kansas. Exploring issues of racial discrimination and masculinity within a potent coming-of-age narrative, Parks looks at rural America during the early twentieth century both nostalgically and critically. In Parks’s words, “Certainly the [film’s] statement is about a black youth living in America, a certain area of America, and how he survives the cruelty of it, and how others didn’t survive.”