Between 1855 and 1887 Winslow Homer made more than 160 drawings to illustrate prose and poetry published in books and popular literary journals. These illustrations constitute a little-known but significant aspect of the career of one of the most distinguished artists in America. Though he established his lasting reputation through his work as a painter in oil and watercolor and as a graphic artist who contributed highly original depictions of American life to Harper's Weekly and other magazines, Homer's illustrations of literature nonetheless hold a distinct place within his oeuvre. Only in his pictorializations of passages from fiction and verse did he depict a truly wide range of emotional states or concern himself with the problems of narrative in visual art, and in these things he proved himself, whenever his texts possessed real substance, to be a master interpreter of literature. He achieved this mastery within the severe constraints that governed...