American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

"Vivid and touching . . . This is the definitive biography of an American master who came in through the back door." —Steve Martin A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography Shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography "Welcome to Rockwell Land," writes Deborah Solomon in the introduction to this spirited and authoritative biography of the painter who provided twentieth-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Norman Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of American democracy. Freckled Boy Scouts and their mutts, sprightly grandmothers, a young man standing up to speak at a town hall meeting, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges walking into an all-white school―here was an America whose citizens seemed to believe in equality and gladness for all. Who was Norman Rockwell? Behind the folksy, pipe-smoking façade lay a surprisingly complex figure—a lonely man all too conscious of his inadequacies. He would eventually be treated by the influential psychotherapist Erik Erikson.