New from NYU Press: The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons
By Donald Dewey
A comprehensive history of American political cartooning, The Art of Ill Will is a rich collection of the wickedly funny images that puncture pomposity and personalize American history. From the Colonial period to contemporary cartoonists like Pat Oliphant and Jimmy Margulies, author David Dewey highlights these artists’ uncanny ability to encapsulate the essence of a situation and to steer the public mood with a single drawing and caption.
Taking advantage of unlimited access to The Granger Collection, which holds thousands of the most significant works of Thomas Nast and other early American cartoonists, this book provides a survey of American history writ large, capturing the voice of the people – hopeful, angry, patriotic, frustrated—in times of peace and war, prosperity and depression.
Despite the
increasing threats they face as daily newspapers merge or vanish,
cartoonists have given us some of our most memorable images, from
Theodore Roosevelt’s pince-nez and mustache to Richard Nixon’s
Pinocchio nose to Jimmy Carter’s Chiclet teeth. Cartoonists featured in
the book include: Benjamin Franklin (whose “Join, or Die” was the first
modern American political cartoon), Puck magazine founder Joseph
Keppler, Uncle Sam creator James Montgomery Flagg, Theodore Geisel
departing from his Dr. Seuss persona to take on World War II, Jules
Feiffer, Garry Trudeau, and Nast.
