William Steig

New Yorker cartoons

Steig began selling his illustrations and cartoons to magazines to support his family during the Great Depression, and quickly became the breadwinner as his father was unemployed. After publishing his first work in The New Yorker in 1930, his work became a staple of the magazine. His comic series called "Small Fry" featured scrappy young characters on the street, inspired by Steig's youth in the Bronx. Steig earned $4,500 in his first year, more than what his family needed. New Yorker cartoon editor Lee Lorenz went on to write a biography of Steig, and said that unlike prominent cartoonists Peter Arno and George Price, he created humor that was visual first and verbal second.

Steig was hailed as the "King of Cartoons", and went on to contribute more than 2,600 drawings and 117 covers to The New Yorker. In 1944 he published his first book of cartoons, Small Fry. His cartoon characters "Poor Pitiful Pearl" was made into a popular line of dolls starting in 1956.

Symbolic drawings

In 1936, Steig moved away from traditional cartoons and began to create more emotionally honest "symbolic drawings", line drawings of complex or distressed characters, such as curmudgeonly hermits and kleptomaniacs. The style became a popular feature of items like napkins and stationary, and caused a shift in the greeting card industry toward realistic sentiments instead of sweet uplifting messages. Steig published multiple books of symbolic drawings starting with About People (1939), of which he later said, "It was supposed to help improve the human condition". Following the release of The Lonely Ones (1942), Steig became a "cult celebrity" and was praised by E. E. cummings as one of the few Americans he respected. W. H. Auden compared Steig's drawings to The Disasters of War by Francisco Goya. Steig published a third collection, All Embarrassed (1944). During Steig's second and third marriages, each of which lasted less than three years, he published The Rejected Lovers (1951) about romantic love.

The New Yorker did not publish the symbolic drawings until William Shawn became editor in 1952, because previous editor Harold Ross had considered them "too personal and not funny enough" for The New Yorker, though he praised them as evidence of Steig's brilliance.

For a 1934 auction organized by Langston Hughes to benefit the defense fund for the Scottsboro Boys — nine African Americans who had been falsely accused of rape and denied fair trials — he contributed an untitled original drawing and a reprint of another.

Shrek

Steig published his best known children's story Shrek! (1990) at age 83. He said he earned $500,000 from DreamWorks Animation for movie rights to the book, which was adapted into the animated film Shrek (2001). Steig attended a screening of the film, and offered the following review: "It's vulgar, it's disgusting — and I loved it." After the release of Shrek 2 in 2004, Steig became the first sole-creator of an animated movie franchise that went on to generate over $1 billion from theatrical and ancillary markets after only one sequel.

Artistic influences

Steig credited Pablo Picasso as his primary inspiration. He said he once ended a longterm friendship due to disagreements about Picasso's merits. He cited Pinocchio as a particularly fascinating story to him during childhood, and his stories have been compared to it. As a child, Steig read and watched extensively, and among his other influences are the books Robinson Crusoe and Robin Hood, films by Charlie Chaplin, the comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids, and Engelbert and Hunperdinck's Hansel and Gretel opera. Additional artists that Steig has praised include Stuart Davis, Albert Ryder, and Chuck Close.

Steig was highly interested in the work of the pseudoscientist Wilhelm Reich, whom Steig credited with saving his life. He did 40 therapy sessions with Reich, and spent time every day in a contraption that he believed was altering levels of orgone. In the 1950s, Steig illustrated Reich's book Listen, Little Man!, and dedicated his own book Agony in the Kindergarten, about parental repression of children, to Reich. Sarah Boxer wrote in Steig's The New York Times obituary that Reich provided Steig with "a confirmation of his belief that people should be emancipated from the inhibitions that society and government impose on children and adults."

Reception

James Geraghty, New Yorker art editor from 1939 to 1973, told Steig in a note, "Recently I have had the occasion to examine thousands of cartoons that have appeared in The New Yorker. One of the impressions remaining to me from this ordeal is the conviction that it would probably not be too extravagant to surmise that in all the history of graphic expressiveness your genius is unsurpassed: for sensitivity and comic perception of the human plight; for loveliness of line, for constant renewal, constant freshness. (The phrase 'graphic expressiveness' is too limiting, but I can't think of another at the moment.) My best, Jim."

Family

Steig married four times and had three children. From 1936 to 1949, Steig was married to educator and artist Elizabeth Mead Steig (1909–83, sister of anthropologist Margaret Mead), from whom he was later divorced. For a time, Steig lived at 75½ Bedford Street, purported to be the narrowest house in Manhattan. Steig's first marriage also made him a brother-in-law of Leo Rosten and an uncle of Mary Catherine Bateson. Steig and Mead were the parents of jazz flutist Jeremy Steig (playing the Pied Piper in Shrek Forever After) and a daughter, Lucinda. He married his second wife, Kari Homestead, in 1950, and they had a daughter, Margit Laura (now professionally known as Maggie Steig). After their divorce, he was married to Stephanie Healey from 1964 to 1966. His final marriage, to Jeanne Doron in 1968, endured for the rest of his life. In 1972, the couple moved from New York City to rural Connecticut. In 1992, they moved from Kent, Connecticut, to Back Bay, Boston.

Steig's brother, Irwin, was a journalist and painter, for whom William illustrated two books on poker strategy. His brother, Henry, was a jeweler and a writer who played the saxophone and painted. And his brother Arthur was a writer and poet, who, according to Steig, read The Nation in the cradle, was telepathic and "drew as well as Picasso or Matisse".

Lifestyle and death

Steig typically drew every day, and was unsentimental about much of his work, calling his field "a dying art form". Steig once told Roger Angell that he desired more freedom and had "always felt that family was a nuisance" though he and his characters always returned to them. Steig described himself as childlike in certain ways, and said, "I think I feel a little differently than other people do. For some reason I've never felt grown up."

Steig died of natural causes in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 3, 2003, at the age of 95. Shrek 2, which was released seven months after his death, was dedicated to his memory.