Where Do You Get Ideas

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The biographer Hermione Lee, whose new life of Tom Stoppard will be published on Feb. 23, 2021. Photo Credit...Jamie Muir - NY Times

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George Booth drawing

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Jacqueline Winspear talks about where she gets ideas.... 

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The World of William Steig by Lee Lorenz

Ach! This is a wonderful, sadly out-of-print book. It was released in 1998, when Steig was still alive, and Lorenz does a terrific job of covering the full range of his career. 

Steig is so fascinating. His parents were socialists and encouraged him to become an artist because they thought it was an honorable profession that let you could earn a living without exploiting anybody. Everybody in the family was an artist — there’s a great painting above done by Steig’s mother, and stories in the book about the whole family getting together to paint. 

Steig’s output was ridiculous — he started out doing pretty run-of-the-mill New Yorker style cartoons, and then started doing his symbolic drawings, which still look fresh and amazing to me. Later on, he had a terrific run of children’s books, including Shrek. (The book is so much cooler than the movie.)

“I often ask myself…what would be the ideal life? I think an ideal life would be just drawing.”  —William Steig

Brick notes:

Highly recommended along with his other books.

Filed under: my reading year 2016