Feiffer, Jules

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Jules Feiffer

Personal

Born January 26, 1929, in Bronx, NY; son of David (a dental technician, then salesman) and Rhoda (a fashion designer; maiden name, Davis) Feiffer; married Judith Sheftel (a motion picture executive), September 17, 1961 (divorced 1983); married Jennifer Allen (a journalist), September 11, 1983; children: (first marriage) Kate; (second marriage) Halley. Education: Attended Art Students' League, 1946, and Pratt Institute, 1947-48, 1949-51.

Addresses

Home—New York, NY; Martha's Vineyard, MA. Agent—Royce Carlton Inc., 866 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Playwright, cartoonist, and satirist. Assistant to cartoonist Will Eisner, 1946-51; drew syndicated cartoon series "Clifford," 1949-51; held various art jobs, 1953-56, including making slide films, as writer for Terrytoons, and as designer of booklets for an art film; freelance cartoonist, with work published in Village Voice, New York, NY, 1956-97, in Observer, London, England, 1958-66, 1972-2000, and in Playboy, 1959—; cartoons syndicated by Publishers-Hall Syndicate and distributed to more than one hundred newspapers in the United States and abroad, 1956-2000. Member of faculty at Yale University School of Drama, 1972-73, Northwestern University, 1996, and Southampton College, 1999—; senior fellow of national arts journalism program, Columbia University, 1997. Military service: U.S. Army, Signal Corps, 1951-53; worked in cartoon-animation unit.

Member

Authors League of America, Dramatists Guild (member of council), PEN, Writers Guild of America, East.

Awards, Honors

Academy Award for Best Short-Subject Cartoon, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1961, for Munro; Special George Polk Memorial Award, 1961; most promising playwright, New York Drama Critics, 1966-67, Best Foreign Play of the Year, London Theatre Critics, 1967, and Outer Critics Circle Award, and Off-Broadway Award, Village Voice, both 1969, all for Little Murders; Outer Critics Circle Award, 1970, for The White House Murder Case; Pulitzer Prize, 1986, for editorial cartooning; best screenplay honor, Venice Film Festival, 1989, for I Want to Go Home; elected to American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1995; honorary D.H.L., Long Island University, 1999; Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, National Cartoonists Society, 2003; Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Writing, Writers Guild of America, East, 2004; Harold Washington Literary Award, 2004; Patricia A. Barr Shalom Award, Americans for Peace Now, 2004.

Writings

FOR CHILDREN

(Illustrator) Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth, Random House (New York, NY), 1961, published with an appreciation by Maurice Sendak, Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

The Man in the Ceiling, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1993.

A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1995.

Meanwhile …, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997.

I Lost My Bear, Morrow (New York, NY), 1998.

Bark, George, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1999.

(Illustrator) Florence Parry Heide, Some Things Are Scary, Candlewick Press (Cambridge, MA), 2000.

I'm Not Bobby!, Hyperion (New York, NY), 2001.

By the Side of the Road, Hyperion (New York, NY), 2002.

The House across the Street, Hyperion (New York, NY), 2002.

The Daddy Mountain, Hyperion (New York, NY), 2004.

FOR ADULTS; CARTOONS, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-confident Living, McGraw (New York, NY), 1958, with introduction by Kenneth Tynan, Collins (London, England), 1959.

Passionella and Other Stories, McGraw (New York, NY), 1959.

(Illustrator) Robert Mines, My Mind Went All to Pieces, Dial (New York, NY), 1959.

The Explainers, McGraw (New York, NY), 1960.

Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl, Random House (New York, NY), 1961.

Feiffer's Album, Random House (New York, NY), 1963.

Hold Me!, Random House (New York, NY), 1963.

Harry, the Rat with Women (novel), McGraw (New York, NY), 1963.

(Compiler and annotator) The Great Comic Book Heroes, Dial (New York, NY), 1965, revised edition, Fantagraphics Books (Seattle, WA), 2003.

The Unexpurgated Memories of Bernard Mergendeiler, Random House (New York, NY), 1965.

The Penguin Feiffer, Penguin (London, England), 1966.

Feiffer on Civil Rights, Anti-Defamation League (New York, NY), 1966.

Feiffer's Marriage Manual, Random House (New York, NY), 1967.

Pictures at a Prosecution: Drawings and Text from the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, Grove (New York, NY), 1971.

Feiffer on Nixon: The Cartoon Presidency, Random House (New York, NY), 1974.

Ackroyd (novel), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1977.

Tantrum: A Novel-in-Cartoons, Knopf (New York, NY), 1979.

Feiffery: Jules Feiffer's America from Eisenhower to Reagan, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982.

Marriage Is an Invasion of Privacy, and Other Dangerous Views, Andrews & McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 1984.

Feiffer's Children: Including Munro, Andrews & McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 1986.

Ronald Reagan in Movie America: A Jules Feiffer Production, Andrews & McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 1988.

Feiffer: The Collected Works, Volume 1, Fantagraphics Books (Seattle, WA), 1989.

Feiffer: The Collected Works, Volume 2, Fantagraphics Books (Seattle, WA), 1989.

Feiffer: The Collected Works, Volume 3, Fantagraphics Books (Seattle, WA), 1991.

Feiffer: The Collected Works, Volume 4, Fantagraphics Books (Seattle, WA), 1997.

Ghost-scripted comic-book series "The Spirit," 1949-51.

PLAYS

The Explainers (satirical review), first produced in Chicago, IL, 1961.

Crawling Arnold (one-act; first produced in Spoleto, Italy, 1961; produced by WEAV-TV, 1963), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1963.

The World of Jules Feiffer, first produced in New Jersey, 1962.

The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler (first produced in Los Angeles, CA, 1967; produced with other plays as Collision Course, off-Broadway, 1968), published in Collision Course, edited by Edward Parone, Random House (New York, NY), 1968.

Little Murders (two-act comedy; first produced on Broadway, 1967; produced by Royal Shakespeare Company in London, England, 1967; revived off-Broadway, 1969), Random House (New York, NY), 1968.

God Bless, first produced at Yale School of Drama, New Haven, CT, 1968; produced by Royal Shakespeare Company, 1968.

Feiffer's People: Sketches and Observations (first produced in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1968; produced in Los Angeles, CA, 1971), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1969.

Dick and Jane: A One-Act Play (also see below; first produced in New York, NY, as part of Oh! Calcutta!, revised by Kenneth Tynan, 1969), published in Oh! Calcutta!, edited by Tynan, Grove (New York, NY), 1969.

The White House Murder Case: A Play in Two Acts [and] Dick and Jane: A One-Act Play (The White House Murder Case first produced in New York, NY, 1970), Grove (New York, NY), 1970.

(With others) The Watergate Classics, first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1973.

Knock-Knock (first produced in New York, NY, 1974), Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1976.

Hold Me! (first produced in New York, NY, 1977), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1977.

Grown-ups (first produced in New York, NY, 1981), Samuel French (New York, NY), 1982.

A Think Piece, first produced in Chicago, IL, 1982.

Feiffer's America, first produced in Evanston, IL, 1988.

Carnal Knowledge (first produced in Houston, TX, 1988).

Elliot Loves (first produced in Chicago, IL, 1988), Grove (New York, NY), 1990.

Anthony Rose, first produced in Philadelphia, PA, 1989.

E-mail (one-act play; first produced as part of Short Talks on the Universe; produced in New York, NY, at Eugene O'Neill Theatre, 2002.

A Bad Friend, first produced in New York, NY, at Mitzi Newhouse Theater, 2003.

SCREENPLAYS

Little Murders, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1971.

(With Israel Horovitz) VD Blues (produced by Public Broadcasting Service, 1972), Avon (New York, NY), 1974.

Popeye, Paramount, 1980.

(Adapter) Puss in Boots, Columbia Broadcast System/Fox Video, 1984.

I Want to Go Home, Marvin Karmitz Productions, 1989.

Contributor of sketches to productions of DMZ Cabaret, New York; writer for Steve Allen Show, 1964; author of episode "Kidnapped" for Happy Endings (series), American Broadcasting Company, Inc., 1975.

OTHER

A Room with a Zoo, Michael Di Capua Books, 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including Ramparts.

Feiffer's books have been translated into German, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, French, and Japanese.

Adaptations

Munro, an animated cartoon based on Feiffer's story, was produced by Rembrandt Films, 1961; The Apple Tree, a musical by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, contains a playlet based on Feiffer's "Passionella," and was produced in New York, NY, 1966; Harry, the Rat with Women was adapted as a play produced at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1966; Carnal Knowledge was adapted as a motion picture, Avco Embassy, 1971; Grown-Ups was adapted for film and produced by PBS-TV, 1986; Popeye, the Movie Novel, based on Feifer's screenplay, was edited and adapted by Richard J. Anobile, Avon, 1980.

Work in Progress

A full-length animated film for Sony pictures.

Sidelights

Decades before he published his first self-illustrated children's book in 1993, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer was well known to young readers as the illustrator of Norman Juster's classic 1961 novel The Phantom Tollbooth. For adult readers, however, Feiffer's satiric cartoons have been a familiar sight in hundreds of newspapers both in the United States and internationally, and feature what Daniel Pinkwater described in the New York Times Book Review as "distinctive loose-limbed" characters. In addition, Feiffer's plays have appeared on numerous stages and several, along with the author/illustrator's screenplays, have been adapted for film.

Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1929, Feiffer grew up in a household dominated by his parents' strained relationship. His mother, a Polish immigrant of an independent spirit, was not happy as a homemaker and mother, and his father, an immigrant of a passive disposition, did not have the business instincts required for success in the competitive U.S. marketplace. The trials of the Great Depression did not help matters in the Feiffer home. Reacting to his parents' stress over money and other matters, and sensing that he was different from other children, Feiffer spent a lot of time in his room, reading—Feiffer's childhood coincided with the golden age of comic books, and Detective Comics appeared on the newsstands in 1937—and drawing. Ironically, this artistic emotional outlet paid off for the young boy; when Feiffer was approximately seven years of age, he won a gold medal in an art contest sponsored by a New York department store.

Discontented with his lot as a child, Feiffer knew the only way to change things was to grow up quickly and find a good job doing something at which he could excel. He decided to become a cartoonist. As Feiffer would recall in The Great Comic Book Heroes: "I swiped [ideas] diligently from the swipers, drew sixty-four pages in two days, sometimes one day, stapled the product together, and took it out on the street where kids my age sat behind orange crates selling and trading comic books. Mine went for less because they weren't real." He studied the comic strips in the pages of the New York Times and the World-Telegram, which his father brought home with him after work. He even salvaged newspapers from garbage cans, or got friends to bring him papers after their parents were through with them. "To see 'Terry and the Pirates,'" Feiffer explained, "we'd have to get the Daily News, which my family wouldn't allow in the house." The reason: his parents—both Jewish and both Democrats—believed that the publisher of the New York Daily News was anti-Semitic.

Feiffer did not view his years attending the city's public school as providing any sort of opportunity. "My idea of going to school was to mark time until I got into the comic-strip business," he once explained in the New York Times Magazine. "But I was never rebellious as a kid. It never occurred to me that I could be. I saw who had the guns. I assumed I was outnumbered from the start, so I went underground for the first twenty years of my life. I observed, registered things, but commented as little as possible."

Becoming an Artist

At the age of fifteen Feiffer enrolled at the Art Students' League. "My mother dragged me," the cartoonist recalled to Gary Groth in Comics Journal. "I was a very shy kid, and very nervous, truly nervous about putting this talent that I fantasized a lot about on the line.… [So] when she … took me by the hand … to the Art Students' League, I remember screaming bloody murder, I didn't want to go. But she thought I should study anatomy, and it was wonderful."

Needing a few credits in order to qualify for college, Feiffer then enrolled at the Pratt Institute for a year, but finding the school's preoccupation with European abstract art little to his liking he switched to night courses. Meanwhile, in 1946, through a stroke of luck, Feiffer became an assistant to cartoonist Will Eisner, one of his childhood idols. "He said I was worth absolutely nothing, but if I wanted to hang out there, and erase pages or do gofer work, that was fine," Feiffer recalled to Groth. Eisner soon had Feiffer writing and doing the layout for the comic strip "The Spirit." In lieu of what Feiffer felt should be a well-earned pay raise, Eisner let the apprentice cartoonist have the space on the last page of his current strip, and the "Clifford" comic was born.

"Clifford" came to a close in 1951, when Feiffer was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War. His experiences as part of the military helped to focus Feiffer on the subject he would satirize for most of his remaining career: the workings of the U.S. government. "It was the first time I was truly away from home for a long period of time," Feiffer explained to Groth, "and thrown into a world that was antagonistic to everything I believed in, on every conceivable level. In a war that I was out of sympathy with, and in an army that I despised; [an army that] displayed every rule of illogic and contempt for the individual and mindless exercise of power. [That] became my material."

Released from duty in 1953, and having failed to find a publisher for his comic drawings, Feiffer found work in 1956 drawing a weekly comic strip for the Village Voice. "We cut a stiff deal," the cartoonist recalled to a writer for Dramatists Guild Quarterly of his early attempt to get published. "They would publish anything I wrote and drew as long as I didn't ask to be paid." While the agreement might not sound too financially sound, it had the desired result. Soon, Feiffer got a call from an editor at a different publication, who, as Feiffer recalled, "said, 'oh boy, this guy is good, he's in the Voice,' and accepted the same stuff his company had turned down when I had come to their offices as an unpublished cartoonist."

Now that Feiffer had paying cartoon jobs, plus his weekly strip at the Village Voice, he began to work on honing his style. Heavily influenced by the work of illustrator William Steig, he worried about finding a medium that would give him the line quality he desired, but that he could also work with. In dealing with reproduction, he tended to stiffen up; he couldn't handle a brush well, he couldn't handle a pen. He could handle a pencil, but pencil lines don't reproduce well. Finally, after almost six months, he stumbled on a technique of using wooden dowels to create a dry line approximating that of pencil, which he would draw using poster and diluted black ink.

Feiffer accepted a paying job at Terrytoons, where he was to develop an animated morning television series. When that didn't pan out, he went to work for Playboy magazine, doing a monthly cartoon. By the late 1950s, Feiffer's cartoons appeared regularly in newspapers across the United States, and the London Observer began including a weekly Feiffer cartoon in 1958. Many of his strips have also been included in published collections, including Feiffer's Album, Feiffer on Nixon, and Feiffer's Children. In 1986 he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Almost "as wonderful as winning the award was the response from friends and strangers," the satirist told David Astor in Editor & Publisher. "It reaffirmed the reason I've been doing the cartoons all these years … and gave me a sense of rejuvenation. One assumes there's an audience out there, but it's not always evident."

Cartoonist, Playwright, and Children's Author

While continuing his work as a syndicated cartoonist, Feiffer became interested in transferring his ideas to the stage, and his first play, Little Murders, was produced on Broadway in 1967. Working in the dramatic form was a natural fit for Feiffer, who had originally begun Little Murders as a novel before switching to all dialogue. Little Murders was a popular and critical success, winning and Outer Critics Circle Award and an Off-Broadway Award, among others. Through the 1980s Feiffer wrote a number of other plays as well as several screenplays that were produced as major motion pictures. His film Popeye, starring Robin Williams, was released in 1980, and his stage works, which include the autobiographical Grown-ups, The White House Murder Case, and God Bless, were produced both in the United States and in Europe.

After taking a break from theatre during the 1990s, in 2003 Feiffer returned with A Bad Friend, a semi-autobiographical drama set in Brooklyn during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Reviewing A Bad Friend in Variety, Charles Isherwood called the work "an ambitious attempt to illuminate the major absurdities and minor tragedies of the era by exploring the pressures that the country's climate of fear put on a pair of communism-besotted parents and their troubled teenage daughter." The play focuses on Naomi and Shelly Wallach, a middle-aged Jewish couple who are also staunch Marxists, and their teenage daughter Rose, who rebels against her parents' dogmatic politics. Rose finds solace in her friendship with Emil, a painter she meets on the Brooklyn Heights esplanade who hides a mysterious past. The play received generally positive reviews. According to New Republic critic Robert Brustein, Feiffer "needs to make his dialogue less quotable and his characters less defined by their politics if he wants to capture more of the flowing, stammering, unpredictable quality of life. In all other respects, this effort to re-create politically conscious theater is cause for celebration." Though New York Times critic Bruce Weber found A Bad Friend to be predictable at times, he also noted, "In the end the play resonates with painful nostalgia and honestly appraised personal history."

Although his work as illustrator of The Phantom Toll-booth was still in print, Feiffer did nothing else in the children's-book field for almost thirty years. His official debut as a children's author came in the early 1990s with The Man in the Ceiling, a story about ten-year-old Jimmy Jibbett and his efforts to win the friendship of the popular Charlie Beemer by expressing a willingness to translate Charlie's stories into cartoons. Cathryn M. Camper noted in Five Owls that The Man in the Ceiling "recognizes that a large part of the formation of an artist takes place in his or her youth.… Feiffer conveys … this with a sense of humor, combining samples of Jimmy's comics to help tell the tale."

Feiffer followed The Man in the Ceiling with A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears, which a Publishers Weekly contributor described as "a sophisticatedly silly fairy tale that relaxes storytelling conventions." Feiffer's next work, Meanwhile …, draws on a fantasy tradition of a more modern sort, as comic-book fan Raymond, pursued by his angry mother, decides to pull the "Meanwhile …" dialogue balloon out of his comic book to see if it will transport him somewhere else in a hurry. "Frantic action and the clever theme make this a great read-aloud," concluded School Library Journal contributor Lisa S. Murphy. Feiffer published I Lost My Bear, amore traditional picture-book effort, in 1998, and Bark, George, a reversal of the old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly story, appeared in 1999.

[Image not available for copyright reasons]

A New Direction

In 2000 Feiffer decided to end his long-running syndicated comic strip; his last cartoon appeared on June 18, 2000. From this point on, the author/illustrator wanted to focus on writing plays and children's books, publishing cartoons in magazines, and teaching. "The big surprise has been how easy it was to give up the weekly strip," Feiffer told New York Times interviewer Mel Gussow, "and how I haven't missed it at all." Feiffer also remarked that his decision was a necessary one. "It seems to me what made me a serious political artist was that I always believed that what I did, along with other cartoonists, could effect change in some way. I no longer have that illusion." He added, "How happy I am that I stumbled into all these other forms."

Continuing his work for children, Feiffer served as illustrator for Florence Parry Heide's Some Things Are Scary, published in 2000. I'm Not Bobby!, "a cathartic book that recalls aspects of Where the Wild Things Are," according to a Publishers Weekly critic, appeared in 2001. In this work, a young boy adopts a series of alter egos after he tires of hearing his name called repeatedly by adults. "What's great about the drawings in I'm Not Bobby!, as in almost all Feiffer's work for children, is that they seem to be culled from Feiffer's bristling imagination rather than directly from the physical world," wrote Dwight Garner in the New York Times Book Review. "He reinvents the universe every time out." In 2002 Feiffer published By the Side of the Road and The House across the Street. In her critique of By the Side of the Road, New York Times Book Review contributor Cynthia Zarin observed that Feiffer's work would appeal not only to children, but also to teenagers and adults. "Feiffer is an artist and a philosopher, and he's in top form here," Zarin stated.

Feiffer told Time interviewer Francine Russo that he feels reenergized by his commitment to theater and children's literature, stating that "it's been wonderful in every possible way." Feiffer added, "I feel as if I've been working in forms that are viscerally as right for me as my cartoons. And it took only thirty or forty years to find it out."

If you enjoy the works of Jules Feiffer

you may also want to check out the following:

A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, a graphic novel by Will Eisner, 1978.

William Steig: Drawings, featuring the artist's New Yorker cartoons, 1979.

Doonesbury, a popular, groundbreaking comic strip by G. B. Trudeau.

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Cohen, Sarah Blacher, editor, From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1983.

Contemporary Dramatists, 5th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1993.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 64, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume 44: American Screenwriters, 1986.

DiGaetani, John L., editor, A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights, Greenwood Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Feiffer, Jules, The Great Comic Book Heroes, Dial (New York, NY), 1965.

PERIODICALS

American Theatre, May-June, 2003, "Twenty Questions: Jules Feiffer," p. 88.

Back Stage, June 27, 2003, Irene Backalenick, review of A Bad Friend, p. 48.

Booklist, November 15, 1993, Elizabeth Bush, review of The Man in the Ceiling, p. 620; December 1, 1997, Stephanie Zvirin, review of Meanwhile …, p. 636; August 19, 1999, Stephanie Zvirin, review of Bark, George, p. 2052; June 1, 2002, Hazel Rochman, review of By the Side of the Road, p. 1742; December 1, 2002, Hazel Rochman, review of The House across the Street, p. 673; May 1, 2004, Jennifer Mattson, review of The Daddy Mountain, p. 1562.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, December, 1993, pp. 120-121; February, 1996, p. 189.

Comics Journal, August, 1988, Gary Groth, "Memories of a Pro Bono Cartoonist"; winter, 2004, "A Thirst for Storytelling;" December, 2003, Gary Groth, interview with Jules Feiffer.

Dramatists Guild Quarterly, winter, 1987, Christopher Duran, "Jules Feiffer, Cartoonist-Playwright."

Editor & Publisher, May 31, 1986, David Astor, "An Unexpected Pulitzer for Jules Feiffer"; May 29, 2000, Dave Astor, "Feiffer Focus No Longer on Syndication," p. 35.

Five Owls, January-February, 1994, Cathryn M. Camper, review of The Man in the Ceiling, pp. 66-67.

Horn Book, September-October, 1997, p. 557; March-April, 1998, Lauren Adams, review of I Lost My Bear, p. 212; January, 2001, review of Some Things Are Scary, p. 83; November-December, 2001, review of I'm Not Bobby!, pp. 735-736; May-June, 2002, Kristi Beavin, review of The Man in the Ceiling, p. 353; May-June, 2004, Joanna Rudge Long, review of The Daddy Mountain, pp. 310-311.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 1997, p. 1110; March 15, 1998, p. 402; November 1, 2002, review of The House across the Street, p. 1611; April 1, 2004, review of The Daddy Mountain, p. 328.

Library Journal, July, 2003, Steve Raiteri, review of The Great Comic Book Heroes, pp. 69-70.

Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1993, Lawrence Christon, "Jules Feiffer Fine-toons His Career," p. E1; June 17, 2000, John J. Goldman, "Swan Song for Feiffer's Dancer," p. D1.

New Leader, July-August, 2003, Stefan Kanfer, "Family Affairs," pp. 41-43.

New York Post, May 26, 2002, "Still Quick on the Draw," p. 62.

New York Times, May 29, 1997, Elisabeth Bumiller, "Jules Feiffer Draws the Line at No Pay from The Voice," p. B1; January 23, 2000, Josh Schonwald, "Laughs and Learning with Jules Feiffer," p. P2; June 17, 2000, Sarah Boxer, "Jules Feiffer, at Seventy-one, Slows down to a Gallop," p. B1; March 4, 2003, Mel Gussow, "Jules Feiffer, Freed of His Comic Strip Duties, Finds a New Visibility," p. E1; June 10, 2003, Bruce Weber, "Uncle Joe Smiles down on a Family of Old Lefties," p. E1.

New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1993, Jonathan Fast, review of The Man in the Ceiling, p. 57; December 31, 1995, Daniel Pinkwater, review of A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears; March 15, 1998, Constance L. Hays, review of Meanwhile …, p. 24; May 17, 1998, Krystyna Poray Goddu, review of I Lost My Bear, p. 22; August 15, 1999, review of Bark, George, p. 24; November 19, 2000, Jeanne P. Binder, "Things That Go Squish in the Night," p. 44; November 18, 2001, Dwight Garner, "'Better Not Call Me Again. I'm a Monster,'" p. 25; September 29, 2002, Cynthia Zarin, "The Boy Who Willed One Thing," p. 27; October 29, 2002, Cynthia Zarin, review of By the Side of the Road; June 8, 2003, Andrea Stevens, "Jules Feiffer's Communist Manifesto," p. 5; June 27, 2004, p. 14.

New York Times Magazine, May 16, 1976, Robin Brantley, "'Knock Knock' 'Who's There?' 'Feiffer'"; June 15, 2003, Deborah Solomon, "Playing with History," p. 13.

New Republic, July 21, 2003, Robert Brustein, "On Theater," p. 25.

Print, May-June, 1998, Steven Heller, Jules Feiffer, "Cartoonist, Author, and Playwright," pp. 40-41; May-June, 1999, Carol Stevens, "Baby Teeth," p. 50; September, 2000, Steven Heller, "Feiffer's Last Dance," p. 26.

Publishers Weekly, October 25, 1993, review of The Man in the Ceiling, p. 62; November 27, 1995, review of A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears, p. 70; January 26, 1998, review of I Lost My Bear, p. 91; June 21, 1999, review of Bark, George, p. 66; October, 2000, review of Some Things Are Scary, p. 76; August 20, 2001, review of I'm Not Bobby, p. 78; May 13, 2002, review of By the Side of the Road, p. 69; October 14, 2002, review of The House across the Street, p. 82; June 30, 2003, review of The Great Comic Book Heroes, p. 59; April 5, 2004, review of The Daddy Mountain, p. 60.

Quill & Quire, November, 1993, p. 40.

Riverbank Review, spring, 1999, p. 22.

School Library Journal, January, 1996, p. 108; September, 1997, Lisa S. Murphy, review of Meanwhile …, p. 180; March, 1998, Julie Cummins, review of I Lost My Bear, p. 179; September, 1999, p. 182; January 1, 2001, Maryann H. Owen, review of Some Things Are Scary, p. 101; November, 2001, review of I'm Not Bobby!, pp. 119-120; May, 2002, Wendy Lukehart, review of By the Side of the Road, p. 152; February, 2003, Wendy Lukehart, review of The House across the Street, p. 111; May, 2003, Steve Weiner, "A Found Feiffer," p. 33; June, 2004, Grace Oliff, review of The Daddy Mountain, p. 108.

Time, May 21, 2001, Francine Russo, "A Matter of Medium," p. G8.

Variety, June 16, 2003, Charles Isherwood, review of A Bad Friend, p. 35.

Washington Post, October 26, 2004, Jane Horwitz, "Jules Feiffer, Reexamining His Red Period," p. C5.