BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — Once upon a time in a town called Brooklyn a children’s author was born…and he played water polo.
An author and illustrator, William Steig was born on November 14, 1907, in Brooklyn, N.Y. and inked his mark on the world in the water and on the page until his death at the age of 95 on October 3, 2003, at his home in Boston, Massachusetts.
One of the most admired cartoonists of all time, Steig spent seven decades drawing for the New Yorker magazine. He touched generations of readers with his tongue–in–cheek pen–and–ink drawings, which often expressed states of mind like shame, embarrassment or anger. Later in life, Steig turned to children’s books, working as both a writer and illustrator. His 1990 book Shrek! was adapted for the big screen and won a 2001 Academy Award for best animated feature film.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Polish–Jewish immigrants Joseph and Laura Ebel Steig, the future illustrator picked up drawing as a teenager and worked as a cartoonist for his high school newspaper. Due to both parents being laborers – his father painted houses and his mother worked as a seamstress – his parents took exception to their four sons choosing certain lines of work. They were forbidden from becoming laborers – for fear of being exploited by businessmen – and were prevented from becoming businessmen – to prevent them from exploiting laborers. Instead the quartet was encouraged to take up the arts.
Following high school, Steig attended the City College of New York, where he earned All–America honors in water polo (although his first love was baseball). From there, he attended the National Academy of Design in New York for three years and spent a week at the Yale School of Fine Arts.
However, the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929 and his family’s need for money set him on the path to fame.
Planning to go to sea, the obligation of taking care of his parents and younger brother fell to him so he turned his eyes from the water to the ink well to feed his clan.
In 1930, he sold his first cartoon to the New Yorker for $40 and was subsequently hired as a staff cartoonist. That first cartoon depicted one prison inmate lamenting to another, “My son’s incorrigible, I can’t do a thing with him.” Over the next 70 years, Steig produced 1,600 drawings and 117 covers for the magazine. He first gained notoriety for his series of “Small Fry” cartoons that depicted hard–nosed brats. They arrived in 1931 and stayed for 30 years, appearing both inside the magazine and on the cover.
Hailed as the “King of Cartoons”, he turned his attention to another medium in his 60’s as the artist remembered for “squiggly” line drawings that depicted “satyrs, damsels, dogs and drunks” with a world view that was unsentimental but humane, playful, earthy and acerbic per his New York Times obituary, took up writing and illustrating children’s books.
Thanks to a colleague urging him to try his hand at a storybook for kids – although Steig did not like drawing the same character multiple times as he preferred to draw something once and move on – he was the author/illustrator of more than 25.
His first book used letters to stand for words. Published in 1968, it was titled “CDB!” which meant “See the bee.” His books featured animal heroes like brave pigs, dogs, donkeys or other strange creatures. Steig focused on animal characters because he felt it gave him more freedom to do wackier things. He also thought children were amused by watching animals behave like the humans they knew.
Starting with his 1968 story “Roland the Minstrel Pig” (about a lute-playing swine), Steig found an eager young audience for his tales. Most featured animals such as 1982’s “Doctor DeSoto” (about a mouse turned dentist with a fox patient), and “Abel’s Island” (about a mouse swept away in a storm).
His third book, 1969’s “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble”, won the Caldecott Medal in 1970, the highest honor a children’s picture book can capture. It tells the story of a donkey who turns into a stone. Another favorite was “The Amazing Bone”, published in 1976, which is about a day–dreaming pig on the way home from school. Deemed semi–autobiographical, Steig’s last book, “When Everybody Wore a Hat”, came out a few months before his death.
For Steig, writing children’s books was “as easy as pie,” he once told the Boston Globe. “A small book, if you’re functioning well, you can write pretty quickly, a few days or a few weeks. The illustrating is more time–consuming: I hate to illustrate my books, because I find it hard to repeat scenes and characters. It looks bad to me.”
One element that made his books so popular was not the pictures – but the words – as he used words never normal to children – such as palsied, cleave and lunatic – along with colorful explanations.
However, his most famous and popular kids book is “Shrek!” (a Yiddish word for fear or terror). The 1990 book of a green-headed ogre who wants to be left alone, becomes friends with a donkey and falls in love with an ogre princess was truly the work of Stieg – an anti-hero with a flawed character that is an underdog.
The tome was so popular that DreamWorks sought out the author to make a feature film of the book. Steig agreed — and, in a Boston Globe interview, said he received $500,000 for the rights – a small price considering the original movie earned hundreds of millions of dollars prior to spinning off a pair of equally lucrative sequels, merchandising and a Broadway musical.
Although other movies were made of his books – including “Abel’s Island,” “Doctor DeSoto,” and “Pete’s a Pizza” – the success of Shrek amazed and amused Stieg who stated about the original movie, ‘It’s vulgar, it’s disgusting — and I love it!’
From Brooklyn, to the water and the comics and finally to children’s books and major motion pictures, the life of William Steig was a fairy tale from start to finish.
The end.
