William Hamilton

William Hamilton (June 2, 1939 – April 8, 2016) was an American cartoonist and playwright. He was most closely associated with the magazine The New Yorker.

Biography Hamilton was born in Palo Alto, California in 1939. Hamilton grew up on the family estate Ethelwild in St. Helena, California. While he came from a moneyed family great-grandson of Mark Lyndsay McDonald, his father was an unemployed, free-spending eccentric amateur inventor.

Hamilton attended Phillips Academy, where the relatively poor Hamilton studied alongside the children of the wealthy. He said that the experience of being "out of place" was "an ideal experience for going into the arts" and "the process of being an alien gives you the distance to be an artist." and was a member of Skull and Bones. He graduated from Yale in 1962 with a degree in English.

While serving in the US Army (1963–5) he sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1965.

His friend Lewis H. Lapham described Hamilton's work: "You were never in doubt about who the cartoonist was. He had a particular beat, as it were — the preppy world, the world of Ralph Lauren, the Protestant WASP establishment that was on their way out, holding onto their diminishing privileges." His play White Chocolate has been described as "a farce about race and class in the upper echelons of New York society." The marriage produced a son and ended in divorce circa 2003.

Hamilton married Lucy Young Hamilton in 2003. Hamilton died in a car accident in Lexington, Kentucky, on April 8, 2016. He was 76. He was survived by his wife, along with his children Gilliam Collinsworth Hamilton and Alexandra Hamilton Kimball. ———————