The Caricaturist
About this ebook
Oliver Fischer, a self-styled bohemian, boardwalk caricaturist, and student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, enrages his banker father and earns the contempt of Philadelphia’s foremost realist painter Thomas Eakins when he attempts to stage Manet’s scandalous painting The Luncheon on the Grass. Soon after, he is ensnarled, along with Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie, in a clash between the Anti-Imperialist League and their expansionist foes. Sent to Key West to sketch the 1898 American invasion of Cuba, in company with war correspondent Stephen Crane, he realizes––in the flash of a naval bombardment––that our lives are suspended by a thread between radiance and annihilation.
The Caricaturist, the penultimate, stand-alone book in The American Novels series, is a tragicomic portrait of America struggling to honor its most-cherished ideals at the dawn of the twentieth century.
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About the author
Norman Lock is the author of The Old Man and the Heath: A Novel and Stories, the dozen volumes of The American Novels series, the short story collection Love Among the Particles, and additional novels, short fiction, poetry, and stage and radio plays. Among other honors, he has been longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and won The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and Big Other Book Award for Fiction. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
