NEW YORK — Jules Pfeiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and author whose prolific output ranged from long-running comics to plays, screenplays and children’s books, died Friday. He is 95 years old, and true to his seemingly tireless self, he published his last book just four months ago.
Pfeiffer’s wife, author J.Z. Holden, said Tuesday that Pfeiffer died of congestive heart failure at his home in Litchfield Springs, New York, surrounded by friends, the couple’s two cats and his latest work. said.
Holden said her husband had been ill for several years. “But he was sharp and strong until the end. And funny.”
Artistically flexible, Pfeiffer hopscotched between different forms of expression, documenting childhood curiosities, urban anxieties, and other social currents. He brought sharp wit and keen observations about the personal and political relationships that defined his readers’ lives.
As Pfeiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work explores “communication and its breakdown between men and women, parents and children, governments and their people, and individuals who don’t get along well with authority.” was dealing with.
Pfeiffer is the recipient of America’s most prestigious awards in journalism and filmmaking, winning the Pulitzer Prize for cartoons in 1986 and winning an Academy Award in 1961 for the animated short film he wrote, Munro. did. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
“My goal is to make people think, make people feel, and in the process, make them smile without laughing,” Pfeiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. idea. This allows people to let down their guard and listen. ”
Feiffer was born on January 26, 1929 in the Bronx. Since childhood he was fond of drawing.
As a young man, he attended Pratt Institute, a Brooklyn-based art and design college, and worked under Will Eisner, creator of the popular comic book character “Spirit.” According to a biography posted on his previous website, Pfeiffer drew his first comic, Clifford, from the late 1940s until he was drafted into the Army in 1951. He served in the signal corps for two years, according to his online biography.
After leaving the military, he returned to drawing comics and found his way to the Village Voice, a then-new alternative weekly newspaper. His work debuted in newspapers in 1956.
The Voice became a beacon of downtown and liberal New York, and Pfeiffer became one of its regulars. His strip, simply called “Pfeiffer,” ran there for more than 40 years.
The Voice was a perfect venue for Pfeiffer’s peppy, liberal sensibilities, and a showcase for the strip, which was praised for its spidery style and scathing satire of typical New York galleries.
“It’s hard to remember what hypocrisy looked like before Jules Pfeiffer sketched it out,” Todd Gitlin, then a professor of journalism and sociology at New York University, told Newsday in 1997. I wrote it. Gitlin passed away in 2022.
Pfeiffer quit the Voice magazine in 1997 amid a pay dispute, sparking an outcry from readers. His strip continued to be syndicated until it ended in 2000.
But even though “Pfeiffer” was retired, Pfeiffer himself was not. He had been developing various side projects for a long time.
He began publishing novels in 1963, starting with Harry the Rat with Women. He began writing plays, he later told Time magazine, because he felt a sense of sociological upheaval that could not be told “in a six-panel comic.”
His first play, 1967’s Little Murders, won an Obie Award, a major honor for off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions.
He eventually moved on from the 1980 film version of the classic comic “Popeye” to harsher territory with “Carnal Knowledge,” the story of two college friends and their toxic relationship with a woman over two decades. Until now, I have written over a dozen plays and screenplays. Pfeiffer wrote the stage and film versions of Carnal Knowledge, which was made into a 1971 film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen, and Ann-Margret. Pfeiffer also contributed to the long-running erotic musical revue “Oh!” Calcutta! ”
But after disappointing reviews for his 1990 play “Elliot Falls in Love,” Pfeiffer turned to the gentler realm of children’s literature.
“My play was about confronting adults with truths they don’t want to hear. But it seems to me that at this particular time, we’ve reached a point where adults know all the bad news. … So I looked around for someone to share the good news with, and I thought it should be the next generation,” Pfeiffer said on National Public Radio in 1995.
Pfeiffer, who illustrated Norton Juster’s seminal 1961 book “The Phantom Tollbooth,” brought ironic surprises to his own books for young readers, starting with 1993’s “The Man on the Ceiling.” The musical version premiered in 2017 at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, New York.
In February 2019, the theater held a surprise 90th birthday party for Feiffer. At that time, Feiffer was interviewed on stage at the screening of “Carnal Knowledge”.
In recent years, Pfeiffer has painted watercolors of his signature figures, taught humor writing courses at several universities, and undertaken other projects. Last September, he published Amazing Grapes, a graphic novel aimed at young readers.
My wife said that she had a lot of fun writing it, enjoying the pictures and the story.
“He was a 5-year-old living in a 95-year-old body,” she said.