D.B. Dowd

D.B. Dowd served as project leader for the Society of Fellows at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 2017-19. Dowd’s recent essays include “Everyman, Meet Somebody: Characterization and Melodrama in Rockwell’s Four Freedoms,” a catalogue essay in Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt and The Four Freedoms, (Abbeville Press, 2018) and “Nostalgia Illustrated: N.C. Wyeth, Advertising, and American Cultural History” for the Brandywine Museum retrospective, N.C. Wyeth: New Perspectives (2019). His book A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated (Spartan Holiday Books, 2020) won a national gold Addy award from the American Advertising Federation in 2021.

 

Posts by D.B. Dowd

The Century of Norman Rockwell

    Norman Rockwell died forty-three years ago today. As a visual storyteller he had few peers, and his timing was good, too. His lifespan (1894-1978) tracked the rise and fall of illustrated magazines with striking precision. The fusty family house magazines like Harper’s Monthly, Century, and Scribner’s Magazine began to give way to cheaper, […]

Sparky’s Opus

As I made my way through the book, I resisted the urge to cherry-pick essays by my favored cartoonists and writers, plowing straight through, which is probably the wrong way to read this book.