William Steig, 95; Children’s Book Author Drew Many Covers for the New Yorker

William Steig, who over seven decades created many of New Yorker magazine’s best covers and cartoons and also wrote some of the most beloved of children’s books, including “Shrek” and the award-winning “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” has died. He was 95.

Steig died Friday night at his home in Boston, his agent, Holly McGhee, announced. The cause of death was not reported.

In all, Steig created more than 100 New Yorker covers, starting with the one that appeared on May 7, 1932, depicting a father glaring at his son’s report card as the child timidly glances up at him.

By then, Steig was already well-established as a cartoonist for the magazine, long revered as the premier publication for his craft.

Throughout his long career, Steig compiled his wryly observant drawings of grown-ups into books that provide a frank, perceptive and comic view of relationships. His first was a collection of drawings from the New Yorker, “Man About Town,” published in 1932. In 1939, he published “About People,” a book of “symbolic drawings.”

Among his last were “Made for Each Other” (2000), which delightfully trembled between pure romanticism and dark realism, and “Sick of Each Other” (2000), which might best be epitomized by the book’s penultimate drawing in which a wife points a revolver at her husband and says, “Say you adore me.”

As Roger Angell, writing in the New Yorker in 1995, understated it, Steig’s work “has not always been lighthearted.”

“In some of the cartoons, men and women yell and quarrel, snap at their kids, glare inkily at each other from old armchairs,” Angell wrote.

Exuberant Colors

Permission to be amused at such otherwise grim observations is granted by Steig’s puckish characterizations and his exuberant palette of colors, which seems to take delight in all of life’s strangeness and joys.

Steig, said author Leonard S. Marcus, a children’s book historian and critic, drew “with a kind of wobbly line, and it makes you feel how perishable life is, and that humans are imperfect.”

“At the same time, the figures are always striving for something,” Marcus told The Times in May. “They’re reaching for the moon, or reaching for each other, and even if they’re old and hobbled, they seem on the edge of dancing.”

John Updike, writing in the introduction to “The World of William Steig” (1998), an illustrated account of Steig’s career by longtime New Yorker cartoon editor Lee Lorenz, described Steig’s New Yorker covers as being “drawn as if with the unpremeditated certainty of a child’s crayoning.”

Steig himself viewed putting the color into his line drawings as “dessert,” and said he thought color was “good for the soul” and that playing with color is “one of the many reasons that painters outlive by far all other creative types.” It is perhaps not surprising, then, to learn that Steig idolized Pablo Picasso. But Lorenz believed that Steig’s “passionate, mysterious and life-affirming” work more closely resembled Paul Klee’s because Steig used his gifts “not to parade his own feelings but to elucidate the feelings of others.”

“And most important, his work, like Klee’s, reveals an unsentimental but forgiving view of the human condition,” Lorenz wrote. He said all of Steig’s heroes were sensitive to love, beauty and music and that the “active use of one’s senses, not wealth or fame, were what gave life meaning.”

Early in his career, Steig showed a unique understanding of children and their anguish and raptures. Among his most popular cartoons were “Small Fry,” which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1931 and ran both inside and on the cover for 30 years. Through the years, “Small Fry” characters reappeared in several of his children’s books, including “Spinky Sulks” (1988).

Though his characters endured adversity, Steig made sure they found a cheerful ending. “I wouldn’t consider writing a depressing book for children,” he once said.

For the entirety of his work, Steig was widely admired by fellow artists such as Edward Sorel, whose work also has appeared on many New Yorker covers and who put Steig “right up there” with Wilhelm Bush, the German 19th century artist who is regarded as one of the founders of the modern comic medium, and Peter Arno, whose cover work for the New Yorker predates Steig’s.

“If we consider his entire oeuvre: his prolific output; the inventiveness of his stories, so often involving transformation; his precise and demanding language; and the sheer beauty of his pictures, then his legacy can only be described as unprecedented,” Sorel wrote in the New York Times review of Steig’s 2003 autobiographical children’s book, “When Everybody Wore a Hat.”

Author-illustrator Maurice Sendak, himself noted for “Where the Wild Things Are” and many other books for children, put it more succinctly: “There is no school of Bill Steig. There is only Bill Steig.”

William Steig was born Nov. 14, 1907, in Brooklyn, N.Y., where his parents, who were Austro-Hungarian immigrants, had settled, but the family soon moved to the Bronx. His father, a house painter, and his mother, a seamstress, were Socialists who urged their three sons toward art as a way to avoid being workers (exploited) and bosses (exploiting others).

As a child, Steig said he was affected by “certain works of art,” including Grimm’s fairy tales, “Robinson Crusoe,” “Robin Hood,” Charlie Chaplin movies, Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel and Gretel,” the Katzenjammer Kids and, especially, “Pinocchio.”

Family Influence

But he was equally influenced by his family, which was prone to operatic fights and reconciliations. (His father loved opera and sometimes would paint pictures of scenes from “Rigoletto” and other operas.)

Steig, writing in “When Everybody Wore a Hat,” said he and his brothers didn’t know what their parents were fighting about because they would argue in German, Yiddish or Polish, although the boys “learned the important words.”

“Dad would yell and Mom would cry,” Steig told Lorenz in “The World of William Steig.” “Then he’d calm down and turn on the charm. Eventually they would kiss and make up.”

Lorenz concluded that although “Steig resists drawing parallels between his art and his family,” the tempestuousness of his parents’ relationship was “a persistent theme in his work.”Steig wanted to be a professional athlete, or a sailor, “like Melville.” He also thought he might like to play the banjo. Or, as Steig’s beloved Pinocchio put it, just “eat, drink sleep and amuse myself, and ... lead a vagabond life from morning to night.”

But the Depression hit, and Steig’s father couldn’t get work as a house painter.

“My father said, ‘I’m afraid it’s up to you, Bill,’ ” Steig said. Though he often spoke of his parents fondly, he also said throughout his life, “I flew from the nest with my parents on my back.”

Steig, who had done some drawing in high school and who had attended City University of New York and the National Academy of Design, began peddling his drawings. Almost instantly, his work began appearing in magazines -- soon, even the prestigious New Yorker. His first cartoon was in the New Yorker in 1930. That year, Steig earned more than $4,000 from his artwork -- enough to support himself and his parents. He also began earning his place among some of the most admired cartoonists and illustrators of his time.

His “Small Fry” drawings were the first to make his name, but Steig soon turned to “symbolic drawings” that didn’t try for a gag line. They were, however, “too personal and not funny enough,” Lorenz told the New York Times in 1997, so Steig had them published in a series of books, including “All Embarrassed” and “The Lonely Ones.”

For the New Yorker, he sometimes drew what he called “hoity-toity” denizens of the upper class, with their furs and tuxedos, although in other respects his characters high and low generally resembled one another.

Many covers were done in the late 1930s and early ‘40s showing “Small Frys” in seasonal activities, from getting out the baseball glove at the first sign of spring to waving sparklers on July 4.

In 1973, New Yorker’s first cartoon editor, James Geraghty, wrote a letter to Steig in which he said that, after having gone through thousands of cartoons that had appeared in the magazine, he had surmised that “in all history of graphic expression, your genius is unsurpassed -- for sensitivity and comic perception of the human plight, for loveliness of line, for constant renewal, constant freshness.”

Yet his time at the New Yorker was not always happy. Lorenz said that Katharine Angell White, who edited cartoons at the New Yorker when Steig first began at the magazine, “devoted much of her time and energy to smoothing his easily ruffled feathers.”

At one point in 1934, in a sharp exchange of notes, White said to Steig, “I think we had better get to the bottom of what is on your mind as we don’t want you to be unhappy and we don’t want you to make us unhappy.”

Lorenz, who recounts this exchange in “The World of William Steig,” explained that Steig was “a man of high ideals, ones that often brought him into conflict with those involved in the less exalted business of producing a weekly magazine.”

In the mid-1960s, Steig accepted the invitation of Robert Kraus, another New Yorker cartoonist, to write a children’s book for Kraus’ new imprint, Windmill Press.

Steig’s first book was “CDB!” (1968), which, when spoken aloud, becomes a simple sentence. It’s a book of word games in which children (and their parents) have to figure out what’s being said based on letter and picture cues.

Many Awards

Among other books published at Windmill are “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” winner of the prestigious Caldecott Medal, about a donkey who gets turned into a stone, and “An Eye for Elephants” (1970).

Steig switched to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, coming under the care of editor Michael di Capua. Di Capua encouraged Steig, who had been interested in doing more writing, to do more “text-driven” books, which resulted in “Dominic” (1972) and “Abel’s Island” (1976).

Among Steig’s many other beloved books for Farrar, Straus & Giroux and later HarperCollins, where he worked with Holly McGhee, are “The Amazing Bone,” which won a Caldecott honor; “Abel’s Island” and “Doctor De Soto,” each of which were named Newberry honor books; and “Rotten Island,” “Brave Irene,” “Spinky Sulks,” “Pete’s a Pizza” and “Shrek,” the last of which was made into an animated movie by DreamWorks.

In his books for children, Steig often put them in Pinocchio-like dilemmas, such as trying to recognize one’s true essence. And, like Pinocchio, Steig’s characters often are off on a series of elaborate adventures, only to return safely home.

Throughout his stories, Steig exhibits, as Lorenz said, “a natural gift for entering the imaginative world of young people,” a gift Lorenz said he shared only with Sendak and E.B. White.

“The fabric of Steig’s world is woven from the woof of imagination and the warp of reality: witches’ spells, dancing pigs, singing dogs, ecstasy, transport, death,” Lorenz said in writing about Steig’s “Dominic,” a meditation on good and evil whose main character is a musical dog who takes off on an adventure.

Steig once said he liked to use animals as his characters because he could get “crazier” and “have them do stranger things.” He told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, “You pick your character first, a donkey or a duck, and then you think of a story to go with the character.”

In such books, Steig showcased not only his mastery of the artwork and the story but also an endearing playfulness with language.

“Rotten Island,” first published as “The Bad Island,” includes this passage: “The insects there could get as big as barracudas -- goggle-eyed with chopping mandibles, bug-eyed and hairy with stinging tails and clacking shells covered with grit and petrified sauerkraut.”

Steig told USA Today in 2001 that children were his favorite people.

“They’re the best company there is,” he said. “In a family gathering, when they send the kids to bed, that’s when the party ends for me.” He added, “I guess it’s just my respect for kids that makes me talk sensibly to them.”

Praised Reich

One who must be mentioned in any account of Steig’s life is the man whom he referred to as the most important figure in his life: Wilhelm Reich, a controversial Austrian-born psychoanalyst who developed a theory in which neuroses resulted from repressed feelings or sexual energy.

“Reich was a great man,” Steig said in “The World of William Steig.” “He was one of the first to recognize fascism as an ‘emotional plague.’ ”

Reich died in jail after he was arrested for selling an unlicensed medical device -- a box that Reich asserted restored the body’s ability to receive a universal energy source he called “orgone.” Steig for most of his life sat daily in an “orgone accumulator” he had in his home. He dedicated “The Agony in the Kindergarten” to Reich.

Talking of Steig’s long association with Reichian analysis, Marcus, the children’s historian, said, “His whole career has been an effort to free himself through his artwork, and to know himself.”

“Steig is very much in the vein of [William] Blake,” Marcus continued. “There’s an ecstatic quality in his sense of art and his sense of life. And part of what gives his vision its depth is the underlying awareness of the terror and sadness which are also part of life.”

Steig once summed himself up very simply:

“I’m satisfied to do humorous drawings,” he said.” “I think cartooning is a worthy art.”

In addition to his wife, Jeanne, a sculptor and writer, he is survived by a son, Jeremy; and two daughters, Lucy and Maggie.