Jules Feiffer

Place of birth: New York

Birthdate: Jan. 26, 1929

Autobiographical Statement:
"So far, I’ve been a political and social cartoonist, a playwright, a novelist, a screenwriter, a satirist, a college professor, and a children’s book author. Writing children’s books is fairly new to my resume. In 2000, in my mid-sixties, I decided to start off the millennium by reinventing myself as a children’s book author. My inspiration came from my three daughters. This new perspective -- looking at the world through a child’s eyes -- was really an old perspective and gave me the chance to see things in a way I had almost forgotten. What I love about entering the children’s book field at this age is being stupid. The problem with doing a weekly cartoon for as many years as I had was that I’d grown too sophisticated. I wish that I could start from scratch and know how to be dumb about it, but I can’t. Being dumb about children’s books makes me child-like in the best way because it returns me to my innocence.

"I was born in the Bronx in 1929 and started drawing at an early age. When I was five, I won a gold medal in an art contest. That’s when I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. I studied unimpressively at James Monroe High School and, after graduation, from 1947 to 1951, I attended drawing classes at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Around the same time, I started working for Will Eisner, the soon to be legendary cartoonist. Eisner allowed me to write scripts for his classic comic, "The Spirit."

"In 1949, Eisner gave me the back page of his "Spirit" section to start my own strip, and "Clifford" was born. He became a Sunday cartoon-page, my first feature in print, which ran in six newspapers from 1949 to 1951. Serving two years in the Signals Corps, I spent my free hours experimenting with what was to be my first satirical cartoon narrative, a picture book for adults called Munro about a four year old boy who’s drafted by mistake into the army. It took six years to find its way into print. Returning to civilian life, I then went from one job to another, managing not to get fired until I worked the six months necessary to earn unemployment insurance, until finally the Village Voice began to print my weekly political cartoon in 1956. It ran for 42 years. Eventually, these strips were pulled together and, in 1958, were published as a book called Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-Confident Living. In April of 1959, Munro was finally published, bought for animation, and in 1961, it was awarded an Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the best short-subject cartoon of the year. My cartoons have been collected into about 19 or 20 books, and have appeared in such publications as the New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, and The Nation. At one point, I was commissioned by the New York Times to create its first op-ed page comic strip, which ran monthly until 2000, when I decided to give up political cartoons for children’s books.

"I’d written books before, but The Man In the Ceiling was my first book for children. Although many people claim it’s a study of the byways of the creative process (a theme I only saw in there after I was told!), I thought the book was about failure. It was important to me as a father and as a former boy to get this out. Having been a smart, sensitive kid who often didn't live up to his own expectations of himself, and having had two children very much the same way, I wanted to deal with the rather un-American idea of failure as a process. In a country where we talk about winners and losers and being number one, we don't give any attention to failure as being one of the more necessary learning tools of life. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years, having taken a lot of lumps along with a lot of success, is that it's not failure that counts; it’s how you treat failure and what your attitude towards it turns out to be. Because if you do anything that is of value, it has to involve risk and the chance of screwing up.

"I've written plays that were raved about that were inferior to the plays that got slammed. I decided early on that I am not going to let the critics determine my own judgment about my work. I am not going to let strangers make judgments on me that prevail in my own mind. But kids do that all the time. And sometimes they -- themselves -- are the critics. When something they do doesn't work out, they can drive themselves nuts. "I stink. I'm no good. I'm lousy." Until you see them through this tantrum, they won't give themselves a break. Sometimes they never give themselves a break.

"The secret of my success comes from the creative use of failure and ineptitude in my life."

Profile:
Jules Feiffer was born and raised in the Bronx, and has spent a good part of his life in New York City. A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, as well as a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, Feiffer has also taught as an adjunct professor at Southampton College, the Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University. He has been a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program, is a member of the Dramatists Guild Council, and was been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. He is the only cartoonist to have had a comic strip published as a regular feature by the New York Times.

Jules Feiffer recently donated some of his papers and several hundred cartoons and manuscripts to the Library of Congress. In 2003, the New York Historical Society presented a retrospective exhibit of his work with an exhibit that spanned his entire professional career, including early cartoons for The Village Voice and manuscripts for his plays, Little Murders and Carnal Knowledge. His awards include a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1986, an Academy Award for his animated short cartoon, Munro, in1961, Obie Awards for his plays Little Murders and White House Murder Case, a Tony award nomination for his play, Knock, Knock, and a Venice Film Festival Best Screenplay award for I Want to Go Home. His play Little Murders also received the London Theatre Critics and Outer Circle Critics Awards; it was adapted to film in 1971.

Early in his career, Feiffer created the illustrations for the now classic children’s story, The Phantom Tollbooth written by Norton Juster. Feiffer and Juster became friends when the lived in the same apartment building in Brooklyn. They shared an apartment for a while and Feiffer started making drawings as Juster was writing chapters of The Phantom Tollbooth as an escape from a mundane project. In fact, some of the characters Juster wrote into the story were actually conceived as a challenge to his illustrator-friend, such as the Triple Demons of Compromise, "one tall and thin, one short and fat, and the third exactly like the other two." Enjoying the word play and off-beat humor the two friends created a book in which the text and art are perfectly complementary. First published in 1961, The Phantom Tollbooth was an immediate bestseller and has remained a standard favorite ever since.

Jules Feiffer returned to the children’s book market nearly thirty years later after establishing his reputation as a political and social cartoonist and playwright. His cartoons had always provided a fresh and witty look at life, touching on social and political issues in his signature style of successive scenes without borders between them, the "panel-less panel cartoon," as Print Magazine called it. Looking for a new direction to his work in the early 1990s, and inspired by his own young children as well as a grandchild born to his oldest daughter, Feiffer has reinvented himself as a children’s book creator.

His first book written and illustrated for children, The Man in the Ceiling, was selected by Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and the Library of Congress as one of the best children’s books of 1993. The New York Public Library placed it on both their lists for children and for young adults as a best book of the year. Feiffer explores the theme of failure in this story of a boy who is no good at sports, doesn’t do well in school, and only wants to draw cartoons. His optimism carries him through his father’s disapproval and the ups and downs of friendship. Illustrated with Feiffer’s energetic black and white cartoons that capture the angst of the main character, the book was a hit with critics and readers alike.

I Lost My Bear was inspired by his daughter who had misplaced a treasured toy in their New York apartment. Told completely from the angst-ridden child’s point of view, this familiar family melodrama comes to a satisfying conclusion after escalating through Feiffer’s energetic art and dialogue. Named an ALA Notable Children’s Book, a Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books Blue Ribbon title, and a Horn Book Fanfare, among other awards, it became an instant success. Bark George, a hilarious cumulative story that is a kind of reversal on the old story of the lady who swallowed the fly, was also named an ALA Notable Children’s Book as well as a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year.

Bark George was made into an animated video by the Weston Woods Studios with actor John Lithgow providing the narration, and premiered at the New Haven Film Festival in September of 2003 in both the adult and children’s part of the program. It was named an ALA Notable Video and won the Best Short Animation Classic in the International Family Film Festival. A film version of I Lost My Bear, also produced by Weston Woods and released in the fall of 2004, is narrated by Feiffer’s daughter Halley, who is currently a student at Wesleyan University.

Jules Feiffer and his wife, Jenny Allan, a writer and stand-up comic, live in New York City with their two daughters. His oldest daughter (from a former marriage) and grandchild live on Martha’s Vineyard.

SELECTED WORKS ILLUSTRATED FOR YOUNG READERS: The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster, 1961, reissued 1989, 1996 (with an appreciation by Maurice Sendak); Some Things Are Scary, by Florence Parry Heide, 2000.

SELECTED WORKS WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED FOR YOUNG READERS: The Man in the Ceiling, 1993; A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, 1995; Meanwhile . . ., 1997; I Lost My Bear, 1998; Bark, George, 1999; I'm Not Bobby!, 2000; By The Side of the Road, 2001; The House Across the Street, 2002; The Daddy Mountain, 2004.

SELECTED WORKS FOR ADULTS: Sick, Sick, Sick, 1958; Passionella, 1959; The Explainers, 1960; Harry: the Rat with Women, 1963; The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler, 1965; Feiffer on Civil Rights, 1966; Feiffer’s Marriage Manual, 1967; Pictures at a Prosecution, Drawings and Text from the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, 1971; Feiffer on Nixon, 1974; Ackroyd, 1977; Tantrum, 1979; Jules Feiffer’s America from Eisenhower to Reagan, 1982.

SELECTED WORKS—PLAYS AND FILMS FOR ADULTS: Munro (animated short subject), 1961; Little Murders, 1968; The White House Murder Case, 1970; Carnal Knowledge, 1971; Knock, Knock, 1976; Popeye, 1980; Grownups, 1982; Elliot Loves, 1988; Anthony Rose, 1989; I Want to Go Home, 1989; A Bad Friend, 2003.

SUGGESTED READING: Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 59, 1998; Horn, Maurice, ed., 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics, 1996; Hochman, Stanley, McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, Volume 2, 1984. Periodicals: Gussow, Mel, "Jules Feiffer Finds New Visibility," The New York Times, March 6, 2003; Stevens, Carol, "Baby Teeth: Five Prominent Artists . . . Turn Their Eye to Children’s Books, Print, May/June 1999; Heller, Steven, "Jules Feiffer: Cartoonist, Author, and Playwright (Interview), Print, May/June 1998.

Web: www.julesfeiffer.com