Jules Feiffer

After years of rejection from every magazine and publisher in New York, he approached the Village Voice with an idea for a new comic strip on contemporary mores. Borrowing themes from his own life, as well as the angst-ridden world of Nuclear Age politics, it turned out to be Feiffer’s breakthrough. Along with a coterie of cabaret comics, including Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, Feiffer introduced a way of seeing and defining our times — sexually, socially and politically — that came as a bracing breath of fresh air to a generation of young people who felt unrepresented by the literature and humor of the time.

He turned the anxiety he saw everywhere around him into witty, revealing cartoon commentaries. His sex-crazed, guilt-ridden character, “Bernard”, served as an early influence on Woody Allen. Garry Trudeau credits his “Doonesbury” as being a direct descendant of Feiffer’s strips. And his long cartoon narratives on the mindlessness of the military and official dup-licity over the Bomb set a precedent for the use of serious subject matter for today’s graphic novelists.

At 37, he turned to playwrighting. His first play was Little Murders, a prophetic vision of random urban violence.

 Well, Jules Feiffer was everything (and more) than we had hoped he'd be. His presentation was witty and enlightening. He was truly in his satrical element... The thousand subscribers in the audience were treated to a special inside view of his comic brilliance.

JCC of Tidewater 

Feiffer has collaborated with some of the major artists of his time, including Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson, Robin Williams and Robert Altman. His films and plays include Carnal Knowledge, Knock Knock, Grown- Ups, Popeye, and A Bad Friend, a play about a teenaged Jewish girl growing up in a Communist family.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons; an Obie and two Outer Critics Circle Awards for his plays; an Academy Award for the animation of his first cartoon satire, Munro; Life-time Achievement Awards from the National Cartoonists Society and the Writers Guild of America (screenplays); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was the first cartoonist commissioned by The New York Times to create comic strips for their Op-Ed page. He also has been honored with major retrospectives at the Library of Congress, the JCC of Washington, DC, and the New-York Historical Society.

In 2000 Feiffer ended his comic strip to focus on writing and illustrating children’s books. He has published three young adult novels (the latest is A Room with a Zoo) and seven picture books, two of which, Bark, George and I Lost My Bear, have been made into animated films.

Now at Southampton College, Feiffer has taught at The Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University. He also was a Sen-ior Fellow at Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Program.

Feiffer wrote a memoir "Backing into Forward" published in 2012, that related how his early failures inspired him to reinvent himself as an artist whose work, 50 years later, still defines him and gives him joy.