Gluyas Williams

Gluyas Williams was one of America's most popular cartoonists between the World Wars. His specialty was gentle satire of big-city suburban life: commuter trains, cigar-wielding businessmen, meek husbands, women's clubs, sandlot ballplayers, and the like. His distinctive pen-and-ink style used bold patches of black and playfully curved lines to great effect. Williams graduated from Harvard in 1911 and spent a year studying art in Paris, but it wasn't until 1920 that he had success selling drawings to magazines like Collier's and Life. In 1922 he began producing Suburban Heights, a syndicated feature that helped pioneer the single-panel-with-caption format that is now a newspaper staple. The feature introduced his signature character, a round-faced and mildly befuddled suburbanite known as Fred Perley. Williams became a regular at The New Yorker in 1930 and was closely associated with the magazine's Robert Benchley; the two met while working on The Harvard Lampoon, and Williams later illustrated Benchley's books of funny essays. Williams spent his adult life in Newton, Massachusetts, commuting to a studio in downtown Boston. He retired from drawing at age 65, in 1953. His books include Fellow Citizens (1940) and The Gluyas Williams Gallery (1957).