Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist and author recognized for lacerating wit, dies at 95

NEW YORK — Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and author whose prolific output ranged from a long-running caricature to performs, screenplays and kids’s books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless type, revealed his final e-book simply 4 months in the past.

Feiffer’s spouse, author JZ Holden, mentioned Tuesday that he died of congestive coronary heart failure at their residence in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by mates, the couple’s two cats and his current paintings.

Holden mentioned her husband had been ailing for a few years, “but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny.”

Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched amongst quite a few types of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, city angst and different societal currents. To every he introduced a pointy wit and acute observations of the non-public and political relations that outlined his readers’ lives.

As Feiffer defined to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work handled “communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority.”

Feiffer gained the US’ most distinguished awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking residence a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and “Munro,” an animated quick movie he wrote, gained a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.

“My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh,” Feiffer advised the South Florida Solar Sentinel in 1998. “Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down.”

Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, within the Bronx. From childhood on, he liked to attract.

As a younger man, he attended the Pratt Institute, an artwork and design school based mostly in Brooklyn, and labored for Will Eisner, creator of the favored comedian e-book character The Spirit. Feiffer drew his first caricature, “Clifford,” from the late Forties till he was drafted into the Military in 1951, in keeping with a biography on his former web site. He served two years within the Sign Corps, in keeping with the web biography.

After the Military, he returned to drawing cartoons and located his approach to a then-new different weekly newspaper, The Village Voice. His work debuted within the paper in 1956.

The Voice grew right into a lodestar of downtown and liberal New York, and Feiffer grew to become certainly one of its fixtures. His strip, known as merely “Feiffer,” ran there for greater than 40 years.

The Voice was a becoming venue for Feiffer’s feisty liberal sensibilities, and a showcase for a strip acclaimed for its spidery type and skewering satire of a gallery of New York archetypes.

“It’s hard to remember what hypocrisy looked like before Jules Feiffer sketched it,” Todd Gitlin, who was then a New York College journalism and sociology professor, wrote in Newsday in 1997. Gitlin died in 2022.

Feiffer stop the Voice amid a wage dispute in 1997, sparking an outcry from readers. His strip continued to be syndicated till he ended it in 2000.

But when “Feiffer” was retired, Feiffer himself was not. He had lengthy since developed a roster of aspect initiatives.

He revealed novels, beginning in 1963 with “Harry the Rat with Women.” He began writing performs, spurred by a way of sociological upheaval that, as he later advised Time journal, he felt he couldn’t tackle “in six panels of a cartoon.”

His first play, 1967’s “Little Murders,” went on to win an Obie Award, a number one honor for Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway productions.

He finally wrote over a dozen performs and screenplays, starting from the 1980 movie model of the traditional comedian “Popeye” to the harder territory of “Carnal Knowledge,” a narrative of two school mates and their poisonous relationships with ladies over 20 years. Feiffer wrote the stage and display variations of “Carnal Knowledge,” which was made right into a 1971 film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson, Artwork Garfunkel, Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret. Feiffer additionally contributed to the long-running erotic musical revue “Oh! Calcutta!”

However after disappointing evaluations of his 1990 play “Elliot Loves,” Feiffer seemed to the gentler realm of kids’s literature.

“My kind of theater was about confronting grown-ups with truths they didn’t want to hear. But it seemed to me we’ve reached the point, at this particular time, where grown-ups knew all the bad news. … So I hunted around for people I could give good news to, and it seemed to me it should be the next generation,” Feiffer advised Nationwide Public Radio in 1995.

Having illustrated Norton Juster’s creative 1961 e-book “The Phantom Tollbooth,” Feiffer introduced a wry marvel to bear on his personal books for younger readers, beginning with 1993’s “The Man in the Ceiling.” A musical model premiered in 2017 on the Bay Road Theater in Sag Harbor, New York.

The theater threw a shock ninetieth birthday celebration for Feiffer in February 2019, when he did an on-stage interview to accompany a screening of “Carnal Knowledge.”

In recent times, Feiffer additionally painted watercolors of his signature figures and taught humor-writing programs at a number of schools, amongst different initiatives. He revealed a graphic novel for younger readers, “Amazing Grapes,” final September.

His spouse mentioned he had nice enjoyable writing it, relishing the drawings and story.

“He was,” she mentioned, “a 5-year-old living in a 95-year-old’s body.”

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