The Caricaturist Shoulder Internal And External Rotation. A young artist meets Stephen Crane as America's hunger for empire draws them both into war 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 ensnared, 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 realisesin the flash of a naval bombardmentthat 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 honour its most cherished ideals at the dawn of the twentieth century.