There’s no get­ting around it: Nor­man Rock­well was a square. There’s also no get­ting around the fact that his career helped define the way main­stream Amer­i­cans saw them­selves for decades. And while an artist like Rockwell—so steeped in nos­tal­gia, so lack­ing in irony and a taste for transgression—might have fad­ed into com­plete irrel­e­vance amidst the tumult of the six­ties, the oppo­site in fact occurred. Instead of pale, freck­le-faced scamps and neigh­bor­ly civ­il ser­vants, Rock­well paint­ed like­ness­es of world lead­ers like Nehru and Nass­er, as well as a now icon­ic sym­bol of the Civ­il Rights strug­gle on a 1964 Look mag­a­zine cov­er.

The six­ties Rock­well, though still very much a pur­vey­or of small town Amer­i­cana, became a some­what weight­i­er fig­ure, even if he nev­er gained (or sought) accep­tance in the art world. But we might think of Rock­well as work­ing on two reg­is­ters through­out his career—as the PG-rat­ed painter of mis­chie­vous, child­ish nice­ness, and the earnest com­men­ta­tor on mores and val­ues in adult soci­ety. In a way, these two sides of America’s most pop­u­lar illus­tra­tor mir­ror those of the nation’s most pop­u­lar writer, Mark Twain. Though sep­a­rat­ed by a gen­er­a­tion, the two, writes the Mark Twain House & Museum’s web­site, are “twinned in many ways in the pub­lic con­scious­ness.”

In part, this is because Rock­well illus­trat­ed for Her­itage Press two of Twain’s most famous books, The Adven­tures of Tom Sawyer in 1936 and The Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn in 1940. Above, see three of Rockwell’s illus­tra­tions from Tom Sawyer and, below, one from his Huck Finn. The dif­fer­ences between the two books (so hilar­i­ous­ly con­trast­ed by Louis CK), could stand for the two sides of both Twain and Rock­well. As the Mark Twain House puts it, “some crit­ics have dis­missed [Twain and Rockwell’s] work as light­weight, blithe­ly ignor­ing the impor­tant state­ments they made on race.” Tom Sawyer is a light­weight book, the work of Twain the pop­u­lar humorist. (Twain him­self would say, “my books are water: those of the great genius­es are wine. Every­body drinks water.”) Huck Finn on the oth­er hand is a seri­ous adult nov­el with seri­ous adult themes. For all of its flaws, it makes an admirable attempt to iden­ti­fy with and faith­ful­ly ren­der the plight of enslaved peo­ple.

Twain’s great strength as a seri­ous writer was his wealth of empa­thy, a qual­i­ty Rock­well man­i­fest­ed as well. In fact, in order to best rep­re­sent Twain’s books, the illus­tra­tor trav­eled to their set­ting, Han­ni­bal, Mis­souri, where he “acquired a new respect for the char­ac­ters,” writes the Nor­man Rock­well Muse­um. “The longer I worked at the task,” Rock­well wrote, “the more in love with the dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties I became.” Illus­tra­tion and design blog Today’s Inspi­ra­tion points out that Rock­well pur­chased old clothes from the Han­ni­bal locals to “soak up the atmos­phere”: “Of all the illus­tra­tors (and there were quite a few) that illus­trat­ed these nov­els in the past, Rock­well was the first to vis­it Mark Twain’s home town. In typ­i­cal Rock­well fash­ion, no amount of detail or research was ignored, faked or quick­ly glossed over.”

Today’s Inspi­ra­tion zooms in on details from sev­er­al of the Tom Sawyer paint­ings to show the fine, almost Ver­meer-like atten­tion Rock­well lav­ished on each illus­tra­tion. The exten­sive exam­i­na­tion of these ear­ly Rock­well clas­sics makes a good case for the folksy illus­tra­tor as a “sto­ry­telling genius with pal­let and brush.” Rock­well may be dis­missed as a cre­ator of kitsch, and in some cas­es the charge is jus­ti­fied, but—like Twain—even his lighter work depend­ed on a fine atten­tion to details of set­ting and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion that make his work mem­o­rable and mov­ing, in its corni­est and its weight­i­est moments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

50,000 Nor­man Rock­well Pho­tographs Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

Bill Mur­ray Gives a Delight­ful Dra­mat­ic Read­ing of Twain’sHuckleberry Finn (1996)

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Spe­cial Friend­ship: He Treat­ed Me Not as a Freak, But as a Per­son Deal­ing with Great Dif­fi­cul­ties

Mark Twain Writes a Rap­tur­ous Let­ter to Walt Whit­man on the Poet’s 70th Birth­day (1889)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Mau­rice Sendak—like some few oth­er excep­tion­al children’s authors—also did work for adults, and in at least one case, did adult work, in his illus­tra­tions for a con­tro­ver­sial 1995 edi­tion of Her­man Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambi­gu­i­ties. The draw­ings are erot­ic, as well as homo­erot­ic, illus­trat­ing the gay sub­text in the nov­el. Sendak may seem like an unlike­ly illus­tra­tor for the Moby Dick author’s work; he was already an unlike­ly Amer­i­can children’s lit­er­ary icon—“Jewish, gay, poor,” he nonethe­less became “a major cul­tur­al influ­ence,” writes blog BLT. As Sendak declared in an inter­view with Bill Moy­ers, he learned to “find a sep­a­rate peace” from his own anx­i­ety not through reli­gious faith but through a “total faith in art.” “My gods,” Sendak told Moy­ers, “are Her­man Melville, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Mozart,” among oth­ers. The author of Pierre fig­ured high­ly in that divine hier­ar­chy.

But Melville, at the time of Pierre’s pub­li­ca­tion, was not loved as a god. Shunned by crit­ics and the read­ing pub­lic after the dev­as­tat­ing recep­tion accord­ed Moby Dick, his self-pro­fessed great­est work, Melville felt fur­ther humil­i­at­ed when his pub­lish­er demand­ed he accept 20 cents on the dol­lar instead of 50 for the next nov­el, Pierre. Crushed, he signed the new con­tract. Then, though he had been sat­is­fied with Pierre, con­sid­er­ing the nov­el fin­ished at the end of 1851, he added 150 pages, much of it a scathing, sar­don­ic indict­ment of the lit­er­ary estab­lish­ment, includ­ing a non-too-sub­tle chap­ter titled “Young Lit­er­a­ture in Amer­i­ca.”

Whether the expan­sion was, as Maria Popo­va sug­gests at Brain Pick­ings, an elo­quent riposte to his crit­ics, or, as Library Jour­nal sug­gests, made at the behest of his pub­lish­ers (unlike­ly) is unclear. Uni­ver­si­ty of Delaware pro­fes­sor Her­schel Park­er, the Melville schol­ar who edit­ed the Sendak edi­tion of Pierre, admits, “we had NOT known when the expan­sion start­ed and had not known just why.” Sendak him­self describes Pierre as “a great and inge­nious work of art.” Of the notion that Melville’s addi­tions were “a vin­dic­tive dia­tribe against all his crit­ics” Sendak spec­u­lates, “he might have been mad and hurt—He must have been mad and hurt. But he wouldn’t have spent that much time on a book being just mad and hurt.”

Sendak, a life­long ama­teur Melville schol­ar, knows what he’s talk­ing about. His famil­iar­i­ty with the author is such that his opin­ion was cit­ed approv­ing­ly in the acknowl­edg­ments of a schol­ar­ly edi­tion of Moby Dick. Despite Sendak’s com­ments in defense of Melville’s lat­er addi­tions, his and Park­er’s ver­sion of Pierre attempts to strip them out and restore the nov­el to its ear­li­er form, one Melville called his “Krak­en book.” Sendak appar­ent­ly ini­ti­at­ed the project in order to pub­lish the draw­ings. In them, writes John Bryan in a review for Col­lege Eng­lish, “Pierre is a full-blown ado­les­cent: mus­cu­lar, ecsta­t­ic, des­per­ate, devot­ed, and lone­ly; he is the man-child invin­ci­ble.” The novel’s hero spends much of his time a blue Super­man out­fit, “red cape and all,” so tight “that it is skin itself, con­ceal­ing noth­ing.”

Bib­liokept com­pares the illus­tra­tions to William Blake. They also con­tain ref­er­ences to Goya and oth­er artists who explored the grotesque, as well as the mor­bid, trans­gres­sive sex­u­al­i­ty of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. “Nowhere else in the his­to­ry of Melville illus­tra­tion,” writes John Bryan, “do we find such open­ings into the latent sex­u­al­i­ty of Melville’s prose.” Brain Pick­ings describes the draw­ings as “the most sex­u­al­ly expres­sive of any of his work, fea­tur­ing 27 dis­cernible nip­ples and 11 male ‘pack­ages’…. Bold, unapolo­getic, and incred­i­bly sen­su­al, the illus­tra­tions are also sub­tly sub­ver­sive in their treat­ment of gen­der iden­ti­ty and stereo­types.”

See many more of these hero­ic and sen­su­al illus­tra­tions at Brain Pick­ings. “The Krak­en Edi­tion”—as Sendak’s Pierre is called—can be had in rather pricey hard­cov­er or used, and appar­ent­ly now out of print, paper­back.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

Mau­rice Sendak’s Emo­tion­al Last Inter­view with NPR’s Ter­ry Gross, Ani­mat­ed by Christoph Nie­mann

An Ani­mat­ed Christ­mas Fable by Mau­rice Sendak (1977)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness