American Mirror

“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. In American Mirror, biographer and art critic Deborah Solomon draws on unpublished papers to explore the relationship between Rockwell’s anguished creativity and his genius for reflecting American innocence. Brilliantly observed and vividly described, American Mirror explains why Norman Rockwell deserves to be remembered as a master of the first rank.

“Solomon offers something new, entertaining, and disturbing . . . [American Mirror] is a revelation.” —John Wilmerding, The New York Times