In this compelling biography, William R. Cross chronicles the life story of the great painter and illustrator Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who captured America in the crucible of the Civil War, and contributed to shaping American identity to this day In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer was the most popular illustrator at Harper's Weekly. That year alone, he sold the magazine twenty-three illustrations--wood engravings, carved into boxwood and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown, inside Tremont Temple. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists being thrown from the church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring "the freedom of all mankind." He is at the heart of the image, face turned skyward and right arm reaching out like a Roman orator. Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in an America in crisis. Nonetheless, he spent his
