“She Concocts A Fictionalized Life”: Norman Rockwell’s Family Furious Over Deborah Solomon’s Biography

The man depicted in Solomon’s new book “lived a far darker life” than the scenes he painted, “fraught with anxiety, depression, and loneliness. He was a twice-divorced, thrice-married repressed homosexual who gravitated toward men and boys.” It’s that last bit that has the Rockwells so upset.

Sam Shepard On Why He Writes

“I couldn’t do anything else but drive a tractor. I felt like this is the only thing I had. … I don’t do it to get a message across. I’m writing just because there are certain kinds of raw material. The material may be very strange, but it takes shape in the course of writing. Whether that has a message or not is not my concern.”

Bob Dylan Charged With ‘Inciting Hate’ Under French Law

“To people who follow the pronouncements of Bob Dylan, his comment in a Rolling Stone interview in September 2012 suggesting that American blacks could sense whether whites had slave-master blood ‘just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood’ may have seemed just the sort of vaporously impressionistic, emotionally pointed kind of thing that Mr. Dylan has been known to say for decades.” Some Croatians in France beg to differ.