Jules Feiffer and Norman Juster famously met in the late 1950s while taking out the trash at their Brooklyn apartment. This friendship would prove to be intellectually and artistically fertile, for Feiffer would eventually come to illustrate Juster’s beloved Phantom Tollbooth. Feiffer may not be as well known as Juster, but his contributions to American arts and letters are nearly as significant.
Feiffer was born into a poor Jewish family in the Bronx in 1929. He spent his younger years idolizing comic book heroes and decided he wanted to illustrate for them. He was only five years old when he won a gold medal in an art contest. He told NPR his thoughts on being a budding cartoonist during the Depression: “I did nothing else! I mean first of all, I was born in 1929 when all sorts of things happened. The Depression hit, but also the Adventure Comics strip hit. Tarzan started his comic strip. Buck Rogers started. So in a way, this is the karmic birth. That I — of all the things that affected me, they came about within a few minutes of my birth!”
School was difficult for Feiffer, though, and he did not get into New York University or Pratt when he applied after high school. He persevered to procure an assistant’s job with Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit. Eisner apprenticed him for three years and was a valuable mentor. Feiffer had the opportunity to write whole episodes and to have a one-page strip of his own called Clifford.
Feiffer knew that he would be drafted into the army to fight in the Second World War, so the restless youth left Eisner and went on a cross-country trip with a friend. He then became an army private. While in this position, he completed a comic entitled Munro about a four-year-old boy drafted into the military and, due to bureaucracy, unable to leave it. Feiffer said of the book’s genesis, “The army made me feel anonymous. I felt that I was being drowned and destroyed by it. And in order to save myself, I began writing and drawing in a way I never had before, which was full of rage. But I understood, even then—early on—that you can’t show your hand to the reader. If you’re angry, and express that anger in a tantrum, or a polemic, then nobody’s interested, including yourself. So you have to find a misleading way—a satiric and comic way—to make your points. Somehow or other, I understood that from the start.” Unfortunately Munro was not published at the time because it was considered too confusing in terms of being drawn for children but aimed at adults in terms of its wit and satire.
Feiffer desperately wanted to achieve recognition for his work, as his idols Saul Steinberg and William Steig had done. Those men drew for the New Yorker, a publication that Feiffer admired but also despised for its elitism. He decided to look to the juvenile book market and gave his portfolio to Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Brothers. Feiffer saw the work of Maurice Sendak and realized this position was already more or less taken.
One fortuitous day, Feiffer stopped by the Village Voice and showed them his work. The editors loved it and said they’d publish anything he gave them.
After Feiffer met Juster, the two became fast friends and Juster began, informally at first, to illustrate The Phantom Tollbooth. Feiffer began dating a woman named Judy Sheftel, who was very connected in the literary world. She told her friend, editor Jason Epstein, about Tollbooth; Epstein agreed and edited the book for Juster.
As for Feiffer, he frequently worried he was not capable of illustrating Tollbooth. He worried about Tock and other animals. Nevertheless, his work was praised when the book was published, with Jane Jacobs writing in The Village Voice that Feiffer was a man “who can draw an idea.”
Feiffer continued to draw for the Voice throughout the 1960s. He won the George Polk Award in journalistic excellence for Feiffer and an Academy Award for writing Munro, which was the Best Animated Short Film. He published books almost yearly and turned his attention to the stage and to film. He was a screenwriter on Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Popeye (1980).
Feiffer remembered his satisfaction working on Tollbooth and jumped headlong back into the children’s book world in his early sixties. The Man in the Ceiling (1993) was about a young boy who dreamed of being a cartoonist, and was very well-received. The book is currently being adapted for the stage.
Among other awards, Feiffer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for political cartoons, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995, was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004, and won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America in 2010. He currently teaches at Stony Brook Southampton, and has also taught at Yale and Northwestern as well as had residences at Columbia and Dartmouth.
