NEW YORK – Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children’s books, died Friday. He was 95 years old and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer’s wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple’s two cats and their recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been sick for a couple of years, “but he was ready and strong until the end. And fun.”
Artistically agile, Feiffer jumped between numerous forms of expression, chronicling childhood curiosity, urban angst, and other social currents. To each he brought sharp wit and keen observations of the personal and political relationships that defined his readers’ lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work was about “communication and its breakdown, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual who does not deal so well with authority.”
Feiffer won America’s top journalism and film awards, taking home a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his cartoons, and “Munro,” an animated short he wrote, won an Academy Award in 1961. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
“My goal is to make people think, make them feel, and at the same time make them smile, if not laugh,” Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. “I find that humor is one of the best ways to embrace ideas. It makes people listen off guard.”
Feiffer was born on January 26, 1929 in the Bronx. Since he was little he loved to draw.
As a young man, he attended the Pratt Institute, a Brooklyn-based art and design school, and worked for Will Eisner, creator of the popular comic book character The Spirit. Feiffer drew his first comic strip, “Clifford,” from the late 1940s until he was drafted into the Army in 1951, according to a biography on his old website. He served two years in the Signal Corps, according to the online biography.
After the military, he returned to drawing cartoons and found his way to a then-new alternative weekly newspaper, The Village Voice. His work debuted in the newspaper in 1956.
The Voice became a central, liberal New York lodestar, and Feiffer became one of its fixtures. His strip, simply called “Feiffer,” was there for more than 40 years.
The Voice was an appropriate venue for Feiffer’s feisty liberal sensibilities and a showcase for a strip acclaimed for its spidery style and skewering satire of a gallery of New York archetypes.
“It’s hard to remember what hypocrisy looked like before Jules Feiffer outlined it,” Todd Gitlin, then a professor of journalism and sociology at New York University, wrote in Newsday in 1997. Gitlin died in 2022.
Feiffer left the Voice amid a pay dispute in 1997, sparking an outcry from readers. His strip continued in syndication until it ended in 2000.
But if “Feiffer” was retired, Feiffer himself was not. I had long since developed a list of side projects.
He published novels, beginning in 1963 with “Harry the Rat with Women.” He began writing plays, driven by a sense of sociological turmoil that, as he later told Time magazine, he felt he couldn’t address “in six panels of a cartoon.”
His first play, 1967’s “Little Murders,” won an Obie Award, a notable honor for Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway productions.
He ultimately wrote more than a dozen plays and screenplays, from the 1980 film version of the comic book classic “Popeye” to the harsher territory of “Carnal Knowledge,” a story of two college friends and their toxic relationships with women. for 20 years. Feiffer 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. Feiffer also contributed to the long-running erotic musical revue “Oh! Calcutta!
But after disappointing reviews of his 1990 work “Elliot Loves,” Feiffer looked to the gentler realm of children’s literature.
“My kind of theater involved confronting adults with truths they didn’t want to hear. But it seemed to me that we had reached the point, at this particular moment, where the adults knew all the bad news. …So I looked for people I could give good news to, and it seemed to me that it should be the next generation,” Feiffer told National Public Radio in 1995.
Having illustrated Norton Juster’s inventive 1961 book, “The Phantom Tollbooth,” Feiffer brought wry wonder to his own books for young readers, beginning with 1993’s “The Man in the Roof.” A musical version premiered in 2017 at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, New York.
The theater hosted a surprise party for Feiffer’s 90th birthday in February 2019, when he did an onstage interview to accompany a screening of “Carnal Knowledge.”
In recent years, Feiffer also painted watercolors of his signature figures and taught humor writing courses at several universities, among other projects. Last September he published a graphic novel for young readers, “Amazing Grapes.”
His wife said he had a lot of fun writing it, enjoying the drawings and the story.
“He was,” he said, “a 5-year-old boy living in the body of a 95-year-old person.”