The Runaway

Rockwell's "The Runaway" depicts a young boy and a middle aged man sitting next to each other in a diner. The boy is a runaway and the man is a police officer. He is looking down at and talking to the boy. What Rockwell is trying to relay is that the officer will not take the boy home.The reason was that this type of "counter-culture" behavior was very common in this time period. Rockwell's "The Runaway" overlooks the fundamental rift that was rising in America throughout the 1950s, an emerging counter-culture that was not concerned with America, but rather themselves.