"American Mirror - The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell," by Deborah Solomon - NYTimes.com Dear fragile Norman Rockwell. He grew up in a series of cramped apartments and shabby boardinghouses in Upper Manhattan, skinny, weak-chinned, squinty, an abysmal student, inept at math, probably dyslexic, neglected by his parents, overshadowed by a handsome, athletic older brother, and for the rest of his life was uncertain of himself and modest to a fault. He enrolled in art school to become an illustrator in the footsteps of Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth, just as the Armory Show of 1913 was about to usher in the avant-garde and relegate illustration - art as storytelling - to the back pages. He was a loner, did not feel close to his parents or brother, was not a devoted father to his three sons. He was married to his work; his three wives, Irene O'Connor, Mary Barstow and Molly Punderson, learned to accommodate. His biographer reports that his love life was stark: "Nothing that can be described as a love letter survives among his papers. It seems unlikely that he ever wrote one. Norman Rockwell Museum "Christmas Packages," by Norman Rockwell, from the December 1920 issue of The American Boy magazine. The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell By Deborah Solomon 493 pp.Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28. It's a fine story, how this odd and fastidious young man worked his way up through a cartoonish phase to become the most beloved American artist of the 20th century, his very name a byword for sentimental Americana - Main Street, the village church, the ball field, the soda fountain, the barbershop, the freckle-faced Boy Scout, the garrulous grandpa, the blushing bride - "an odd-duck artist yearning for normalcy and community," writes Deborah Solomon, "a small-town Arcadia of his own imagining." He created images that reside in collective memory - the weary and gloomy dad waiting with his eager fresh-faced son for the train that will take the youth away to college, the old lady and her grandson in the luncheonette bowing their heads to say grace surrounded by indifferent onlookers, the soldier returning home to his cheering neighbors. And his astonishing "Triple Self-Portrait," the skinny guy with opaque glasses and pipe, squinting into the mirror and rendering a handsomer version of himself. He believed that a painting was more than color and form, that it needed to carry a story - "The story is the first thing and the last thing," he said - and so he painted very few landscapes. He was a meticulous painter of faces, and he toiled long days to get the expressions right, working from photographs of models, directing them as if for a movie, sketching draft after draft, expressing "his interior visions with a level of preciseness that made his painted world all the more compelling." At a time when painters were making big bold swashes and dripping paint on canvas, trying to make art by sheer force, Rockwell was working up close, ever meticulous. His heroes were Pieter Bruegel, whose "Peasant Dance" (a reproduction) hung over Rockwell's mantel, and the Dutch masters. He wanted to make ordinary American scenes as Rembrandt might have painted them. The artist we know as Norman Rockwell began to emerge clearly in 1938 when he and his second wife, Mary, having lived at the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th in New York and then New Rochelle and then a house in the Seventh Arrondissement in Paris, moved to Arlington, Vt., a town of 1,400 - "He wanted to experience small-town life," Solomon writes, "to counter a feeling of staleness in his work, to work with new models. Models who were not models, just ordinary people devoid of pretense. In the summer of 1942, eager to contribute to the war effort, Rockwell went to the Office of War Information, the propaganda agency in Washington, with sketches for posters illustrating the four freedoms laid out by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a speech to Congress - freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, freedom from want - and was turned away. The agency wasn't interested in illustrators; they wanted real artists. So he took the idea to The Saturday Evening Post, which accepted it. It took him seven months to paint his "Four Freedoms" pictures - a Lincolnesque workingman standing up and speaking at a town meeting, a cluster of profiles of persons in prayer, a mother and father watching over two sleeping children, a family gathered around the Thanksgiving table - which appeared in The Post and drew sacks of fan mail and was used by the Treasury to sell war bonds. The O.W.I., which had turned him down the year before, put out two and a half million "Four Freedoms" posters. "He now became enshrined as America's leading Painter-Patriot," Solomon writes. In the eyes of millions of Americans, his scenes . . . amounted to an inspired defense of national values, a pictorial rebuke to fascists the world over. When Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Mass., in 1953, his neighbors were "surprised by his unassuming demeanor." One said: "He didn't just act modest. He was modest. Everyone liked him because he was unpretentious and never imposed himself on you in any way. Garrison Keillor is the host of "A Prairie Home Companion" on public radio.