Norman Rockwell’s the name. You’ll know it of course. Rockwell the byword. It wasn’t simply the perpetual air of impending Thanks- giving that gave his Saturday Evening Post covers such appeal. Rockwell covers were cover stories really; that was their distinction. Others, John Falter for example or Steve Dohano, delivered similar eyefuls of graphic cheer to the mass readership but never came near him in popularity. They could ape the manner but not the air. Legend has it that, in his heyday, every time the Post ran a Rockwell, they upped the print order by a quarter of a million. Whether this is true hardly matters: print the legend.
Every cover picture off the Rockwell easel was bound to give the reader at least five minutes of viewing pleasure, hours possibly in the pre-telly age. Between 1916 and 1963 he produced more than 300 of them. That suggests not just evenings and days and years but entire decades, in aggregate, devoted by a high proportion of the One Nation Under God to his lashings of homely detail.
None more attentive than Richard Halpern, who teaches English at Johns Hopkins and approaches Rockwell’s art and mind with the caution of a scholar fully charged with powers of textual analysis.
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