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Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize and Oscar-winning cartoonist, playwright, and screenwriter, was born in 1929 in The Bronx, New York City. In the 1940s, he apprenticed with comic strip artist Will Eisner on "The Spirit" at Quality Comics Group. The strip had struggled during World War II after Eisner was drafted in 1942, but upon his return, Eisner, with help from assistants like Feiffer, revived it. Under Eisner’s mentorship, Feiffer learned to tell stories through both illustrations and words. Feiffer is best known for his cartoons in The Village Voice, which was founded in Greenwich Village in October 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer. His cartoons ran in The Voice for 42 years and were syndicated in many Sunday newspapers. He was also the first opinion-editorial page cartoonist for The New York Times, holding the position from 1997 to 2000.
Beyond cartoons, Feiffer wrote the 1967 play Little Murders, which was adapted into a 1971 film. Although the play was a Broadway flop, lasting only one week with seven performances featuring Heywood Hale Broun and Elliott Gould, Feiffer wrote the screenplay for the film directed by Alan Arkin. Despite Gould’s popularity during the era of student social upheaval, the film did not succeed at the box office.
However, Feiffer achieved notable cinematic success that same year with his screenplay for Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (1971), a sharp critique of the sexual attitudes of men who matured just after World War II. Feiffer’s first film work was the 1961 animated short Munro, which won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Cartoons.
Feiffer has published over 20 books, including the children’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth (1970), which he illustrated and was adapted into a film the same year.
His cartoons for The Village Voice have been compiled into 19 volumes. He also authored acclaimed children's books such as The Man in the Ceiling and A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears.
After teaching at Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University and serving as a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program, Feiffer joined Southampton College (Long Island University’s graduate school). His many honors include membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1995), the National Cartoonist Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), and being named the Creativity Foundation’s Laureate in 2006.
