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finally swung in favor of the Allies. Although the merciless German siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) continued, the Soviet Red Army had forced a surrender of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad in January, a battle that claimed 1.1 million Soviet casualties alone. By May, the Western Allies had their first major victory with the surrender of German and Italian forces in North Africa. Planning for an Allied invasion of Europe was underway.
    The war effort dominated life in the United States. Rationing of all rubber products, gasoline, and other petroleum derivatives began in 1942. Sugar and coffee were next. By 1943, the ration list expanded to include canned soups and juices as well as meat, fish, and dairy products. Wanting to contribute to the war effort, Americans planted more than twenty million “Victory Gardens” that, by 1943, accounted for one-third of all vegetables consumed in the country. The military deployment of so many men created masses of job openings and virtually eliminated unemployment. Three million kids aged twelve to seventeen took up the slack and went to work. On May 29, the cover of the Saturday Evening Post featured “Rosie the Riveter,” illustrated by Norman Rockwell, in recognition of the millions of women comprising almost a third of the nation’s work force.
    Keller was the middle child—and only boy—of three born to Professor Albert Galloway Keller and his wife, Caroline. During World War I, Albert had been stationed with the army in Washington, DC. He and his wife instilled in their children the importance of national service. After his high school years at the elite Taft School, Keller followed in his father’s footsteps and enrolled at the college whose campus had been his childhood playground, Yale University. During his senior year at Yale, he began studying art at the legendary Art Students League of New York, an atelier-type school founded in 1875 by artists, for artists, without degree programs or grades, but one that provided a richly creative environment and self-directed course of study.
    In 1926 Keller received a Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, an honor awarded annually to fewer than a dozen of America’s most gifted emerging artists and scholars. Such recognition placed his name among past greats—architect John Russell Pope and art historian Charles Rufus Morey—and others who would follow, including composer Aaron Copland; writers William Styron, Archibald MacLeish, and Robert Penn Warren; architects Louis Kahn and Richard Meier; and artists George Biddle and Chuck Close.
    For the next three years, Keller lived and studied at the academy, where the learning environment was intoxicating. He became proficient in Italian and traveled throughout the country. Some of his acquaintances within the American Academy later developed into lasting friends, including two men who would play prominent roles in his life: Norman Newton, an accomplished landscape architect, and Walker Hancock, a gifted sculptor. * By the end of his term, Keller had advanced his knowledge and skill as an artist and fallen in love with the country and its people.
    After returning home in 1929, Keller accepted the position of Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at the Yale School of the Fine Arts. In 1936, he rose to Associate Professor. While he continued developing his skills as a painter, drawing—a discipline he once said “leads an artist to all the possibilities”—was the medium that sustained him throughout his career.
    Of the many joys that drawing provided, none outweighed the chance meeting with Katherine Parkhurst Hall, a student in Keller’s life drawing class at Yale. At thirty-five, he was the distinguished professor and artist; she was ten years his junior, pursuing her interest in the restoration of decorative arts. Their courtship lasted two years; they married in 1938. Two years later, they had their first child, Deane Galloway Keller, named