Rejected by the Navy for being eight pounds underweight, a 20-year-old Norman Rockwell binged on bananas and donuts overnight, passed the scale the next morning, and was promptly assigned to be a military artist. This episode pushes past the sentimental Americana stereotype to follow his early hustle: art school at 14, art editor of Boys' Life at 19, a 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts, and 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post over 47 years.

We examine his agonizing perfectionism, staging live models and combining dozens of reference photos, and why postwar critics dismissed his optimism as a philosophical lie. The conversation covers the Four Freedoms paintings that cost him 15 pounds over seven months, the 1943 studio fire that destroyed his props and changed his subject matter, his treatment by psychoanalyst Erik Erikson at th ...