I am grateful to Dianne Bennett, Karal Ann Marling, and Tamara Thornton for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

1. Rockwell, Norman, Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator, as told to Thomas Rockwell (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 261–63Google Scholar. The Saturday Evening Post was acquired by Curtis, Cyrus H. in 1897Google Scholar. George Horace Lorimer became editor in 1899. Between 1897 and 1908, Post circulation grew from 2,000 to over one million. Over a period of forty-seven years, Rockwell painted 317 Post covers (Cohn, Jan, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989], 5, 21, 60Google Scholar; and De Young, Gregg, “Norman Rockwell and American Attitudes Toward Technology,” Journal of American Culture 13 [Spring 1990]: 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar). For an overview of the history of illustration, see Best, James J., “Illustration,” in Handbook of American Popular Culture, ed. Inge, M. Thomas (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), 3: 69–89Google Scholar.

2. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 219Google Scholar; and Guptill, Arthur L., Norman Rockwell: Illustrator (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1946), xxviGoogle Scholar.

3. Rockwell had significant investments in American Telephone and Telegraph, Columbia Gas & Electric, and about a dozen other companies at the time of the 1929 stock-market crash. In May 1930, the total value of securities held in the Norman Rockwell trust was about $38,000; within a year, most of the stocks, and the portfolio's value, had declined by 30 or 40 percent. See statement, “Estimated Income from Securities Held by the Chase National Bank,” and “Norman Rockwell Trust,” both in box 48, file “Chase National Bank Records,” Norman Rockwell Papers, Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

4. On the social functions of authenticity, see Orvell, Miles, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1989), 70–71Google Scholar. On regionalism, see Dorman, Robert L., Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 103–4Google Scholar.

5. Alexander, Jack, quoted in Guptill, Norman Rockwell, xxii (“the masses”)Google Scholar.

6. “Norman Rockwell: Illustrator of America's Heritage,” American History Illustrated 21 (12 1986): 24Google Scholar. Even this statement reveals something less than complete self-possession, since it implies the existence of an objective, preexisting America that need only be observed.

7. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 45Google Scholar. See also Hatch, Alden, “Meet Norman Rockwell,” in Rockwell, Norman, Meet Norman Rockwell (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1979), 9Google Scholar. Rockwell's dual perspective on his work, as well as the difficulty of labeling his work high culture or low culture, suggest that Rockwell might be labeled midcult or middlebrow. On the educational and publishing project known as “great books” (1920) and the emergence of the book-review section of the New York Herald Tribune as a vehicle of middlebrow culture (1924), see Rubin, Joan Shelley, “Between Culture and Consumption: The Mediations of the Middlebrow,” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 163–91Google Scholar. On the Book-of-the-Month Club, see Radway, Janice, “The Book-of-the- Month Club and the General Reader,” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Davidson, Cathy N. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

8. “Norman Rockwell: Illustrator,” 24.

9. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 199Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., 333.

11. Joan Shelley Rubin attributes the emergence of middlebrow culture to basic economic forces–the development of a mass market and a consumer society — as well as to the essentially democratic desire to find a wider audience for literature. In addition, Rubin conceptualizes middlebrow culture as a form of personal liberation, with the leaders of the middlebrow movement in rebellion against the psychic costs exacted by the repressive ways of genteel Victorian America (see Rubin, , “Between Culture and Consumption,” 167, 182Google Scholar).

12. One can only speculate on the reasons for Rockwell's fondness for Dickens. One possibility is what Sally Stein describes as the “ambiguity of [Dickens's] class position” (Stein, , “Making Connections with the Camera: Photography and Social Mobility in the Career of Jacob Riis,” Afterimage 10 [05 1983]: 13Google Scholar). More generally, Dickens's melodramatic realism bridged the gap between high culture and popular culture, an achievement that inspired not only Rockwell, but other creators of early-20th-century mass culture, including Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith. On Chaplin, see Manvell, Roger, Chaplin (London: Hutchinson, 1975), 4Google Scholar; Charlie Chaplin's Own Story, ed. Geduld, Harry M. (1916; rept. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), vii (Geduld introduction)Google Scholar; and McCabe, John, Charlie Chaplin (London: Magnum, 1979), 15–16, 55Google Scholar. On Griffith, see Schickel, Richard, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 41, 112–13, 120, 534Google Scholar.

13. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 16Google Scholar.

14. Walton, Donald, A Rockwell Portrait (Kansas City, Kans.: Sheed Andrew and McMeel, 1978), 35Google Scholar.

15. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 40, 53, 112Google Scholar. In contrast, most regionalists had some significant exposure to a traditional social order and its landscape and were the children of ranchers, farmers, and the rural/small-town middle class. See the collective regionalist biography in Dorman, , Revolt of the Provinces, ch. 1, esp. 33Google Scholar.

16. Dorothy Canfield Fisher argues that Rockwell avoided landscapes because of his desire to paint only the human scene. See her introduction to Guptill, , Norman Rockwell, xiGoogle Scholar. During the 1920s, several Rockwell covers and illustrations featured the hobo/tramp, a symbol of mobility and uprootedness. See Norman Rockwell: A Definitive Catalogue, text and catalogue by Moffatt, Laurie Norton, 2 vols. (Stockbridge, Mass.: Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, 1986), 1: C260, A306, A474, and, less clearly, C259Google Scholar. In three of these cases, the isolation of the hobo is mediated by the presence of a dog, and the general impression conveyed by these representations is one of satisfied self-sufficiency (Figure 3). Rockwell's interest in the hobo might have been simply a response to the ubiquity of the hobo on the American scene in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but Rockwell also clearly enjoyed doing this kind of picture (Guptill, , Norman Rockwell, 130Google Scholar). It is also true that the hobo/tramp's radical separation from society made the figure a mass-culture icon. Jack London wrote about the tramp in his The Road (1907) and, after 1914, Charlie Chaplin and his figure of the tramp were virtually one persona. See Ringenbach, Paul T., Tramps and Reformers, 1873–1916: The Discovery of Unemployment in New York (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973): 3–35Google Scholar; Robinson, David, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London: Collins, 1985), 113–14Google Scholar; and Musser, Charles, “Work, Ideology and Chaplin's Tramp,” Radical History Review 41 (Spring 1988): 36–66Google Scholar.

17. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 35–36Google Scholar.

18. Walton, , Rockwell Portrait, 112Google Scholar; and Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 135–36Google Scholar.

19. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 281Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., 125.

21. Ibid., 202.

22. Ibid., 197–98.

23. Rockwell employed this perspective to advantage in his depiction of freedom of religion for his well-known series, The Four Freedoms for Which We Fight, published in the Post in early 1943. See Olson, Lester C., “Portraits in Praise of a People: A Rhetorical Analysis of Norman Rockwell's Icons in Franklin D. Roosevelt's ‘Four Freedoms’ Campaign,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (02 1983): 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Rockwell, Peter describes his relationship with his father in “My Father, Norman Rockwell,” Ladies' Home Journal, 11 1972, 84, 88Google Scholar.

25. Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective, catalogue of an exhibition organized by Bernard Danenberg Galleries, New York, with text by Buechner, Thomas S. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972), 42Google Scholar; and Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 252Google Scholar (Rockwell's test for his models), 44 (Vermont's expressive people). For the situations noted, see Moffatt, , Norman Rockwell, 1: C243, C244, C260, C269, C277Google Scholar.

26. Ratcliff, Carter, “Barnett Newman: Citizen of the Infinitely Large Small Republic,” Art in America 79 (09 1991): 92–93Google Scholar. A brief survey of the lives of others who made their mark on American mass culture in the same period reveals significant parallels to Rockwell's radical ungroundedness. Charlie Chaplin was born in London in 1889 to music-hall artists who were constantly on the move. Chaplin's relationship with his father ended in 1891 when the marriage dissolved. When Charles was six, his mother became ill, plunging what remained of the family into desperate poverty, separating Charles from his half-brother, and inaugurating a period when Charles lived with another family and in charity institutions. His father died in 1901, and two years later, when Charles was twelve, his mother was declared insane. A stage career that began in 1898 meant endless city-to-city tours with his company, dissipating what little remained of Chaplin's sense of place. By 1915, Chaplin's isolation was reinforced and deepened by fame. “I was a celebrity that everyone knew,” he later told his son. “I was loved by crowds, but I didn't have a single close friend I could talk to. I felt like the loneliest man alive.” The figure of the tramp, created in 1914, was a visual representation of Chaplin's own profoundly distended existence.

D. W. Griffith's childhood was not as impoverished or as rootless as Chaplin's, but neither was it free from physical dislocation and emotional distress. Griffith was born in the village of Beard's Station, Kentucky, in 1897 and raised for a time at Lofty Green, the family homestead — a farm in decline — for which Griffith developed a deep and romanticized attachment. From his father, a former Confederate colonel who was badly injured in the Civil War, Griffith took what Richard Schickel, his biographer, refers to as his “taste for a wandering and deliberately unsettled life” and a profound emotional remoteness. Griffith's deep love and admiration for his father went unrequited, and from that rejection Griffith fashioned a self that refused to be vulnerable. “He rarely spoke of his own troubles,” writes Schickel, “and made no inquiries about anyone else's. Indeed, one can find in none of the reminiscences of those who worked with him a single incident in which an exchange of confidences took place, let alone an exchange of intimate emotions.” A physical uprooting followed the death of his father in 1882. Debts forced the family off Lofty Green and finally into Louisville, where the Griffiths occupied seven rented residences, taking in boarders at each address. Unlike Rockwell, who could never identify his roots in any compelling way, Griffith understood that he was attached to and grounded, however inadequately, to Lofty Green and rural/small-town Kentucky.

Other relevant figures include Burroughs, Edgar Rice, the creator of Tarzan of the Apes (1912)Google Scholar, and Wister, Owen, author of The Virginian (1902)Google Scholar. Born in Chicago in 1875, Burroughs appears to have been solidly and securely grounded in a prosperous, business-oriented, upper-middle-class culture that he did not like and spent much of his youth and young adulthood trying to escape. A stint with the Seventh Cavalry in Arizona, a stern and overly critical father, and a series of unsatisfying jobs and entrepreneurial efforts tore Burroughs from his moorings and produced the separation from the existing social order that made Tarzan and other innovative fantasies possible.

Born in 1860 to aristocrats in the Philadelphia suburb of Germantown, Wister began life as the most thoroughly grounded of all our examples. He traveled extensively, attended boarding schools in Switzerland and Concord, New Hampshire, enjoyed Harvard and its club life and Boston society, and otherwise lived the privileged life of his class. Yet, at age twenty-five, he remained undecided about his future. A trip to Wyoming in the summer of 1885 brought to the surface Wister's growing feeling that his social class, and the sort of grounding it involved, was an anachronism. “We Atlantic coast people,” he wrote in his Western notebook for that year, “all varnished with Europe…will vanish from the face of the earth. We're no type, no race—we're transient.” Over the next fifteen years, and culminating in The Virginian, Wister would make the case for the American West as the locus of a new kind of grounding — fatherless, classless, and relative-less — a grounding in open, geographical space.

On Chaplin, see Robinson, , Chaplin, 10, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 27, 37, 40, 78Google Scholar; Chaplin, Charles Jr, My Father, Charles Chaplin (New York: Random House, 1960), 25 (“I was a celebrity”)Google Scholar; and Manvell, , Chaplin, 27–30 (on the tramp), 32–35, 50Google Scholar. See also Geduld, , Charlie Chaplin's Own Story, 2–3, 8Google Scholar.

On Griffith, see Geduld, Harry M., Focus on D. W. Griffith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 1–14Google Scholar; Henderson, Robert M., D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 17, 29, 51–53Google Scholar; and Schickel, , D. W. Griffith, 23–24Google Scholar (unsettled life), 26 (intimate emotions), 39.

On Burroughs, see Holtsmark, Erling B., Edgar Rice Burroughs (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 1–5, 18Google Scholar; and Fenton, Robert W., The Big Swingers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 11Google Scholar.

On Wister, See Etulain, Richard W., Owen Wister (Boise: Boise State College, 1973), 5–9, 17, 38Google Scholar; Payne, Darwin, Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 14, 19, 37, 67, 71, xiiGoogle Scholar; and Vorpahl, Ben Merchant, My Dear Wister —: The Frederic Remington—Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto, Calif.: American West, 1972), 19–20 (“varnished with Europe”), 30, 35Google Scholar.

27. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 261, 262Google Scholar (“flattered”), 280, 281, 263 (“gay man”). On Babbitt and Sinclair Lewis, see Hearn, Charles R., The American Dream in the Great Depression (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1977), 47–48Google Scholar.

28. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 281Google Scholar.

29. Ibid., 263.

30. On character and personality, see Hearn, , American Dream, 37, 145Google Scholar.

31. Orvell, , Real Thing, 70–71Google Scholar.

32. Graebner, William, A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution, 1875–1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. See Lasch, Christopher's critique of nostalgia as an “abdication of memory” in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 14 and ch. 3Google Scholar.

33. According to Milton W. Brown, between 1915 and 1920 the artistic and literary products of many American writers and artists, including Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, and Charles Burchfield, used the child as a symbol of the possibilities of freedom in an otherwise stultifying, provincial, small-town existence (Brown, , American Painting: From the Armory Show to the Depression [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955], 176Google Scholar). On Rockwell's use of technology to present universalism, see De Young, , “Norman Rockwell,” 95–99Google Scholar.

34. Cohn, , Creating America, 8–10, 81Google Scholar.

35. Kouwenhoven, John A., The Arts in Modern American Civilization (1948; rept. New York: Norton Library, 1967), 137Google Scholar (“literalness”), 139 (“respect for the thing seen”).

36. Rockwell, , quoted in Kouwenhoven, Arts in Modern American Civilization, 147Google Scholar.

37. Geldzahler, Henry, American Painting in the Twentieth Century (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1965), 97–98Google Scholar.

38. Ibid., 15–17, 102–6.

39. Ibid., 103, 105; and Hatch, , “Meet Norman Rockwell,” 9Google Scholar.

40. Walsh, Dorothy, “Some Functions of Pictorial Representation,” British Journal of Aesthetics 21 (Winter 1981): 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. Romano, John, Dickens and Reality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 23Google Scholar.

42. Dunne, Michael, Metapop: Self-Referentiality in Contemporary American Popular Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 190Google Scholar.

43. Compare Rockwell and Harry Houdini, whose impossible stunts had the illusion of reality.

44. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 43Google Scholar (“as I saw it”), 227 (“they laughed at the kids”). To define what is “real” involves defending one's definition of what is real against competing definitions. On the social construction of reality, see Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar; Kelly, T. Gordon, “The Social Construction of Reality,” Prospects 8 (1983): 49–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mussell, Kay, “The Social Construction of Reality and American Studies,” Prospects 9 (1984): 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 307Google Scholar.

46. Ralph Thompson to Norman Rockwell, September 26, 1923, in box 35, no file (loose), Norman Rockwell Papers.

47. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 87 (Windsor chair)Google Scholar; and Walton, Rockwell Portrait, 151Google Scholar (“reflections and shadows”).

48. On the simulacra, see Baudrillard, Jean, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Wallis, Brian (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984)Google Scholar; and Orvell, , Real Thing, 77Google Scholar.

49. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 260Google Scholar. Rockwell's comingling of imitation and authenticity was a facet of historical reconstructions in this period. On Henry Ford's Greenfield Village and Colonial Williamsburg, see Wallace, Michael, “Visiting the Past: History Museums in the United States,” Radical History Review 25 (Fall 1981): 63–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Note, too, that Rockwell was a friend of the king of authentic illusion, Walt Disney. Like Disney and Ford, Rockwell used history in a profoundly anti-historical way. Despite the need for some notion of an historical past that nostalgia would seem to imply, Rockwell insisted on the essential unity of past and present, at least until the Great Depression. “Before [the First World?] war,” he writes, “there wasn't a break between the past and the present as there is now. Everything was sort of now — both past and present were one, a single unit.” Perhaps, then, it was the function of nostalgia to produce this sense of unity across time and, paradoxically, to deny history and historical change (Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 241Google Scholar).

50. Lears, T. J. Jackson describes and interprets Sherwood Anderson's very different, yet related, ideas about authenticity in “Sherwood Anderson: Looking for the White Spot,” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13–37Google Scholar. Like Rockwell, Anderson was associated with the advertising industry.

51. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 288Google Scholar.

52. Ibid., 298–99. Of all the work that Rockwell did in Paris, only a sketchbook and a watercolor survive. The Land of Enchantment (1934) has angles and lines of force unusual in Rockwell's work (Rockwell, Norman, My Adventures as an Illustrator (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994 edition), 275Google Scholar).

53. Guptill, , Norman Rockwell, xxviGoogle Scholar.

54. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 300Google Scholar.

55. Ibid., 312, 220–21.

56. Ibid., 230, 231.

57. Ibid., 298.

58. Ibid., 57, 58.

59. Ibid., 50.

60. Ibid., 182.

61. Ibid., 289; and Moffatt, , Norman Rockwell, 1: 116 (C312)Google Scholar. There are a few other examples of Rockwell's denial of facial expression (see Moffatt, , Norman Rockwell, 1: C48 and C301Google Scholar).

62. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 288–89Google Scholar.

63. Orvell, , Real Thing, 185Google Scholar.

64. Ibid., 199, 226–228; and Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935–1938 (New York: Da Capo, 1973)Google Scholar.

65. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 316–18Google Scholar. The 1939 New York World's Fair was a key event in the obsolescence of traditional design and the growth of modern graphic design. See Meggs, Philip B., “The 1940s: Rise of the Modernists,” Print 43 (11/12 1989): 68–69, 71Google Scholar.

66. Baigell, Matthew, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974), 13, 18–21, 40, 43Google Scholar.

67. Pells, , Radical Visions, 97–104Google Scholar; and Dorman, , Revolt of the Provinces, 125, 72Google Scholar (“acids of modernity”).

68. Baigell, , American Scene, 55Google Scholar (Time), 45, 43. On regional journalism in the South, see Pyron, Darden Asbury, “Gone with the Wind and the Southern Cultural Awakening,” Virginia Quarterly Review 62 (Autumn 1986): 568–69, 572Google Scholar. On the decline of the regionalist aesthetic and the emergence of abstract expressionism, see Doss, Erika, “The Art of Cultural Politics: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. May, Lary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 195–220Google Scholar.

69. Baigell, , American Scene, 61Google Scholar; and Geldzahler, , American Painting, 111Google Scholar. See also Stegner, Wallace, “The Power of Homely Detail,” American Heritage 36 (08/09 1985): 65Google Scholar.

70. Brown, , American Painting, 196Google Scholar.

71. Pells, , Radical Visions, 115, 118, 152Google Scholar.

72. See Brown, , American Painting, 192Google Scholar; Geldzahler, , American Painting, 111, 94Google Scholar; Pells, , Radical Visions, 200Google Scholar; and Hearn, , American Dream, 109–15, 122, 130, 134Google Scholar.

73. See also Susman, Warren, ed., Culture and Commitment, 1929–1945 (New York: George Braziller, 1973), 20–21Google Scholar.

74. Cohn, , Creating America, 252Google Scholar.

75. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 30, 31Google Scholar.

76. Ibid., 27 (grandfather), 30 (mother).

77. Ibid., 102 (“observed them”), 99 (“couldn't respect”), 104 (suffocated).

78. Ibid., 251.

79. Ibid., 150.

80. Ibid., 100 (“mystery”), 293–94 (accept failure).

81. Guptill, , Norman Rockwell, 53Google Scholar.

82. Walton, , Rockwell Portrait, 141–42Google Scholar.

83. Atherton, John, “On The Official Boy Scout Handbook,” Revue Française d'Études Américaines 12 (04 1987): 286 (boys and old men)Google Scholar; and Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective, Buechner text, 75 (declining use of children). On Rockwell's portrayal of women, see Moffatt, , Norman Rockwell, 1: C314, C329, C333, C339, C364, C88, C336Google Scholar.

84. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 198Google Scholar.

85. Ibid., 302–6; and Dorman, , Revolt of the Provinces, 90–91Google Scholar (on Twain and regionalism). Twain's position outside the dominant culture and its ideas of success and hard work may also have accounted for Rockwell's interest in the project (see Hearn, , American Dream, 4–7Google Scholar).

86. Compare Rockwell's actions with Agee, James's sense of himself as an intruder into the lives of the tenant farmers about whom he is writing in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)Google Scholar (see Klug, Michael A., “James Agee and the Furious Angel,” Canadian Review of American Studies 11 [Winter 1980]: esp. 313–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar). However inept Rockwell's search for the truth, his effort might be understood as a variant of Agee's tortured struggle to reconcile life and art, the “facts” and the artist's need to present (and hence alter) those “facts.” Rockwell shared something of Agee's respect for some reality inherent in common objects, a reality presumably independent of the artist; hence both men valued and used the camera in their work. However, Rockwell understood little if anything of Agee's concern with how the presence of the artist inevitably complicated experience and made the knowing of truth, and the telling of it, virtually impossible. Interestingly, Agee's search for new ways of knowing and telling owed much to the methods of James Joyce, who Rockwell mentions — whether seriously or not one cannot say — as a symbol of his own artistic crisis. On Agee, see Barson, Alfred T., A Way of Seeing: A Critical Study of James Agee (N.p.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 29, 36, 71, 74–77, 90Google Scholar.

87. On Rockwell's turn to hyperrealism in the late 1930s, see Moffatt, , Norman Rockwell, 1: 70, C186Google Scholar. Rockwell's affirmation of realism is apparent in his response to a letter he received from author Corey Ford, in October 1935, praising an illustration Rockwell had done for a Ford story. “You have the knack,” Ford wrote, “which no other illustrator who has ever tackled a story of mine has ever had, of drawing the character I saw in my own mind, and in making the coloring of the water and of the sky look exactly the way the Thyee fishing grounds of Campbell River did look when I was there.” Rockwell's reply, handwritten at the bottom of Ford's letter, foregrounded the problem of realism and the artist's deep commitment to it. “Your story was really a swell one to illustrate,” Rockwell wrote, “as the clear waters were so real and pictureable. But to tell you the honest truth I was really not very much pleased with my work….” (Corey Ford to Norman Rockwell, October 31, 1935, and Rockwell's reply, November 11, 1935, in box 72, file “C”, Norman Rockwell Papers).

Rockwell's use of Twain was also consistent with Rockwell's need to affirm his mass-culture orientation. See middlebrow critic Stuart Pratt Sherman's discussion of Twain's facility for playing to the crowd, in Rubin, , “Between Culture and Consumption,” 177Google Scholar.

The Tom Sawyer book was not especially successful; as of mid-1938, it had sold only 3,677 copies (October 1, 1938, royalty statement, in box 6, folder “Heritage,” Norman Rockwell Papers).

88. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 324–25Google Scholar.

89. Ibid., 329–33.

90. Guptill, , Norman Rockwell, 33Google Scholar. On Rockwell's commitment to individualism and universalism, see Ratcliff, , “Barnett Newman,” 92–93Google Scholar; and, for background, Rubin, , Making of Middlebrow Culture, 29–32Google Scholar.

91. Walton, , Rockwell Portrait, 130Google Scholar.

92. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 325Google Scholar.

93. See Rubin, , Making of Middlebrow Culture, 3–32Google Scholar; Riesman, David, Glazer, Nathan, and Denney, Reuel, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950)Google Scholar; and Susman, Warren I., “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (1973; rept. New York: Pantheon, 1984), 271–85Google Scholar. According to Susman, George Horace Lorimer's 1902 best-seller, Letters From a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, is an example of the character-based approach (281).

94. On the opposition of market and place, see Zukin, Sharon, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 5–16Google Scholar.

95. Rockwell, , Norman Rockwell, 324–27Google Scholar.

96. Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective, Buechner text, 75, 85. Rockwell's work also became increasingly self-referential. In 1925, in a study for a Post cover that was never published, he had experimented with putting himself in one of his pictures. His own image appeared on the cover of the Post for the first time in October 1938 (Figure 1). By 1960, his experiments with self-referentiality had become more convoluted (Moffatt, , Norman Rockwell, 1: C370, C496bGoogle Scholar).

97. Lacey, Candida Ann, “Striking Fictions: Women Writers and the Making of a Proletarian Realism,” Women's Studies International Forum 9 (1986): 380–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, , American Painting, 169–70Google Scholar; and Park, Marlene, “Lynching and Anti-lynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s,” Prospects 18 (1993): 311–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The decade also produced important theoretical work on the nature of art in late modernity, including Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). Unlike Rockwell, who was searching for a way out of mass culture, Benjamin argued that the technical reproduction that defined contemporary art (especially the cinema) allowed for and enabled an experience of anxiety and disorientation that was basic to understanding the late-modern world. Benjamin's essay is reprinted in Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968)Google Scholar. For an interesting comparison of the artistic theories of Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, see Vattimo, Gianni, The Transparent Society (1989: rept. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ch. 4Google Scholar (“Art and Oscillation”).

98. Much the same thing happened in politics and economics, where existing systems — two-party democracy and capitalism — came under attack.