Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer-Prize and Oscar-winning cartoonist,
playwright and screenwriter, was born on 1929 in the New York City
borough The Bronx. During the 1940s, the young Jules apprenticed with
comic strip artist Will Eisner on his "The Spirit" strip at the Quality
Comics Group. The strip had floundered during the war, after Eisner had
been drafted in 1942, but upon his return, Eisner -- with the aid of
assistants such as Feiffer -- reinvigorated the strip. Under Eisner,
Feiffer learned how to tell a story in illustrations and words. Feiffer
is most famous for his cartoons for The Village Voice, which was opened
for business in a Greenwich Village in October 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed
Fancher and Norman Mailer. Feiffer's
cartoons, which ran in The Voice for 42 years, were syndicated to a
wide variety of Sunday papers. He also has the distinction of being the
first opinion-editorial page cartoonist employed by The New York Times,
a post he held from 1997 through the year 2000.
In addition to his cartoons, Feiffer wrote the 1967 play
Kleine Mörder (1971), which was
turned into a film in 1971 despite being a flop on Broadway, lasting
but one week of seven performances with a cast that included
Heywood Hale Broun and
Elliott Gould. Feiffer wrote the
screenplay for the film, which was directed by
Alan Arkin; despite having Gould, then at the
height of his fame during the student social upheavals that were
cresting and would soon abate, the film was not a success at the box
office.
However, Feiffer did taste great cinema success that same year with his
screenplay for Mike Nichols,
masterpiece
Die Kunst zu lieben (1971), an
acerbic look at the sexual mores of men who came to maturity just after
World War II. Feifer's first foray with motion pictures was the
animated short film 'Munro (1961) (I)', which won the 1961 Academy Award
for Best Short Subject, Cartoons.
Feiffer has published over 20 books, including the children's classic
Milos ganz und gar unmögliche Reise (1970),
which he illustrated and which was made into a movie in 1970.
Feiffer's cartoons for the Voice have been collected in 19 volumes; he
also has written the acclaimed children's books "The Man in the
Ceiling" and "A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears".
After teaching at the Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University
and serving as a Senior Fellow at Columbia University's National Arts
Journalism Program, Feiffer took a post at Southampton College (the
graduate school of Long Island University). Among his many honors are
membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1995), the
National Cartoonist Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award
(2004), and being named the Creativity Foundation's 2006 Laureate.
