Culture

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell BY Deborah Solomon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hardcover, 512 pages. $28.
The cover of American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

Is Norman Rockwell the epitome of American normalcy that many say he is? A new biography argues that Rockwell didn’t “mirror” American life in any true way; his work was, if anything, a kind of funhouse mirror in reverse, turning a world that was really full of strange bumps and twists into something eerily becalmed and normal-looking.