William steig author biography in the back
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Obituary: William Steig 1907-2003
posted November 30, 2003
"There is no school of Bill Steig - there is only Steig." - Maurice Sendak
William Steig, the prolific New Yorker illustrator once dubbed the "King of Cartoons" best known in recent years for his award-winning work in children's books, died Friday, October 3 at his home in the Back Bay section of Boston. The family announced through Steig's agent and friend Holly McGhee that the artist's death was due to natural causes. Steig enjoyed two distinct career paths of note - first that of a master cartoonist and illustrator whose work for magazines such as the New Yorker was frequently collected in book form, and then that of a popular children's book author and illustrator who won awards and acclaim for works such as Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Roland the Minstrel Pig, and Pete's a Pizza. Admired by cartoonists and illustrators in several fields, William Steig's con
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Writers for young children have a nearly impossible task: to amuse both the kid being read to and the adult doing the reading. Doing one or the other is hard enough, and only a select handful of geniuses can manage both. William Steig is one. His books are silly and sweet, as books for children should be, but they are also unsettling, strange, and sometimes scary. Beauty and dread coexist; there is whimsy, even silliness, but also palpable anxiety, peril, and despair in Steig’s world—or maybe this is just the real world. Despite the jaunty djur protagonists and inexplicable magic, Steig seems to me to be one of the more realist of writers for children.
Steig was, of course, known for his comics and covers for The New Yorker. Roger Angell wrote a Profile of Steig for the magazine, in 1995, which recounts that it was at the urging of his fellow-cartoonist Robert Kraus that Steig turned to children’s books—to make money, Steig claimed. His cartoons for adult readers aren’t funny,
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