Jules Feiffer

Jules Ralph Feiffer ( ; January 26, 1929 – January 17, 2025) was an American cartoonist and author, who at one time was considered the most widely read satirist in the country. His parents were David Feiffer and Rhoda , and Feiffer was raised in a Jewish household with a younger and an older sister. David was usually unemployed in his work as a salesman due to the Depression, while Rhoda was a fashion designer who made watercolor drawings of her designs which she sold to various clothing manufacturers in New York. "She'd go door to door selling her designs for $3," recalled Feiffer. However, the fact that she was the breadwinner created an "atmosphere of silent blame" in the home. Feiffer began drawing at age three. "My mother always encouraged me to draw," he said.

When Feiffer was 13, his mother gave him a drawing table for his bedroom. She also enrolled Feiffer in the Art Students League of New York to study anatomy. He graduated from James Monroe High School in 1947. He wrote in 1965 about his childhood:

quote|I came to the field with a more serious intent than my opiate-minded contemporaries. While they, in those pre-super days, were eating up "Cosmo, Master of Disguise"; "Speed Saunders"; and "Bart Regan Spy", I was counting up how many panels there were to a page, how many pages there were to a story – learning how to form, for my own use, phrases like: @X#?/; marking for future reference which comic book hero was swiped from which radio hero: Buck Marshall from Tom Mix; the Crimson Avenger from The Green Hornet ... He began to decipher features of different cartoonists, such as the sentimental naturalism of Abbie an' Slats, the [Preston] Sturges-like characters and plots of others, with cadenced dialogue. Feiffer recalls that Will Eisner's Spirit rivaled them in structure, and no strip, except [Milton] Caniff's Terry [and the Pirates], rivaled it in atmosphere."

Career Cartoonist With Will Eisner (1946–1956)

Feiffer has written two novels (1963's Harry the Rat with Women, 1977's Ackroyd) and several children's books, including Bark, George; Henry, The Dog with No Tail; A Room with a Zoo; The Daddy Mountain; and A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears. He partnered with The Walt Disney Company and writer Andrew Lippa to adapt his book The Man in the Ceiling into a musical. Feiffer illustrated the children's books The Phantom Tollbooth and The Odious Ogre. His non-fiction includes the 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes. described on its dustjacket as a "novel-in-pictures". Like the trade paperback The Silver Surfer (Simon & Schuster/Fireside Books, August 1978), by Marvel Comics' Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and the hardcover and trade paperback versions of Will Eisner's A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (Baronet Books, October 1978), this was published by a traditional book publisher and distributed through bookstores, whereas other early graphic novels, such as Sabre (Eclipse Books, August 1978), were distributed through some of the first comic-book stores.

Feiffer's autobiography, Backing into Forward: A Memoir (Doubleday, 2010), received positive reviews from The New York Times and Publishers Weekly, which wrote:

Feiffer has had retrospectives at the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and The School of Visual Arts. His artwork is exhibited at and represented by Chicago's Jean Albano Gallery. In 1996, Feiffer donated his papers and several hundred original cartoons and book illustrations to the Library of Congress. In 2016, Feiffer published Cousin Joseph: A Graphic Novel, a prequel to Kill My Mother. Cousin Joseph was also published through Liveright Publishing, and was a New York Times Bestseller, named one of The Washington Post s Best Graphic Novels of the Year, and was nominated for the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize. A third book in the series, The Ghost Script: A Graphic Novel, was published by Liveright in 2018. After Mike Nichols adapted Feiffer's unproduced play Carnal Knowledge as a 1971 film, Feiffer scripted Robert Altman's Popeye, Alain Resnais's I Want to Go Home, and the film adaptation of Little Murders.

The original production of Hold Me! was directed by Caymichael Patten and opened at The American Place Theatre, Subplot Cafe, as part of its American Humorist Series on January 13, 1977. The production ran on the Showtime cable network in 1981. He wrote the book for a musical based on a story he wrote earlier, Man in the Ceiling, about a boy cartoonist who learned to pursue his dream despite pressures to conform. The musical was produced and directed by Jeffrey Seller in 2017 at the Bay Street Theatre in neighboring Sag Harbor, New York.

Art instructor Feiffer was an adjunct professor at Stony Brook Southampton. Previously, he taught at the Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University. Feiffer has been a Senior Fellow at the Columbia University National Arts Journalism Program. He was in residence at the Arizona State University Barrett Honors College from November 27 to December 2, 2006. During the summer of 2009, Feiffer was in residence as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he taught an undergraduate course on graphic humor in the 20th century. A second daughter, Kate Feiffer, is the author and playwright of My Mom Is Trying to Ruin My Life and other works.

His third marriage took place in September 2016, when he married freelance writer JZ Holden; the ceremony combined Jewish and Buddhist traditions. Holden is the author of Illusion of Memory (2013).

Feiffer lived in upstate New York with his wife and their two cats. Feiffer died from congestive heart failure at his home in Richfield Springs, New York on January 17, 2025, nine days before his 96th birthday.

Honors and awards 1961, recipient of a George Polk Award for his cartoons 1961, film Munro won Academy Award for animated short 1969 and 1970, won Obie Award and Outer Circle Critics Award for plays Little Murders and The White House Murder Case; 1986, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for political cartoons 1989, won the Golden Osella for I Want to Go Home (1989). 1995, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2006, received the Creativity Foundation's Laureate 2010, won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America 2023, won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild of America

Selected works

Sick, Sick, Sick (1958) Passionella and Other Stories (1959) Smart George (2020) Amazing Grapes (2024)