Norman Rockwell, my adventures as an illustrator

Norman Rockwell's autobiography conveys the flavor of his art: it is at once nostalgic, sharply focused, and humorous. His gift for description and anecdote, so evident in his illustrations, serves him well as a writer. Here is a man with a good story to tell and the ambition to do it well. And what excellent material he had! For Rockwell had an astonishingly long and fruitful life. He painted his first Saturday Evening Post cover before World War I and illustrated the first manned landing on the moon for Look over fifty years later. By World War II his art possessed a level of realism and moral seriousness that made it speak for the entire nation. After the war, he was well on his way to becoming a public figure, but the reader will find no dull lists of achievements, none of the idle name-dropping that mars the memoirs of so many famous people. Rockwell leaves us in 1959, hard at work on a Saturday Evening Post cover -- deeply engrossed by his work, struggling to get it right. The First edition of Rockwell's autobiography ended then, and although he considered updating it in his lifetime, events kept interfering. For this new edition, Thomas Rockwell, who crafted the original autobiography from his father's transcribed reminiscences, writes about the last twenty years of his father's life: his third marriage after the death of Mary; the years of his greatest fame; and the inevitable waning of his physical powers, which seems particularly shocking in the case of a man as reliant on his eye and hand as Rockwell was. This new edition of Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator also includes 138 illustrations, 50 of them in color. Most of the illustrations and all of the color plates are made from original Rockwell paintings and drawings. The many sketches that show Rockwell in the course of developing ideas carry the immediacy of the text into the illustrations. - Jacket flap.