Book excerpt: Rockwell was both an optimist and a humanist. The driving force in his work lay in his abiding faith in the goodness of human nature. He was incapable of being mean. Even when he poked fun at his subjects, he did so without derision. He was equally incapable of violence. Given these traits, and adding to this his apolitical nature, it is remarkable that Rockwell's images created during World War II somehow captured the spirit of a nation at war in a way that no other body of work managed to accomplish.