Art Young
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Art Young (January 14, 1866 – December 29, 1943) was an American cartoonist and writer. He is most famous for his socialist cartoons, especially those drawn for the radical magazine The Masses between 1911 and 1917.
[edit] Biography
Young was born in near Orangeville in Stephenson County, Illinois. He enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Design in 1884, the same year in which his first published cartoon appeared in a trade paper entitled, Nimble Nickel. Also in that same year, he began working for a succession of Chicago newspapers including the Evening Mail, the Daily News, and the Tribune.
In 1888, Young resumed his studies, first at the Art Students League in New York City (until 1889), then at the Académie Julian in Paris (1889-90). Following a long convalescence, he joined the Chicago Inter-Ocean (1892), to which he contributed political cartoons and drawings for its Sunday color supplement. In 1895 or 1896, he worked briefly for the Denver Times, then moved again to New York City where he sold drawings to the humor magazines Puck, Life, and Judge, and drew cartoons for William Randolph Hearst's New York Evening Journal and Sunday New York American.
Young started out as a generally apolitical Republican, but gradually became interested in left wing ideas, and by 1906 or so considered himself a socialist. He became politically active; by 1910, racial and sexual discrimination and the injustices of the capitalist system became prevalent themes in his work.
Young voiced his beliefs and opinions as co-editor of and contributor to the socialist illustrated journal, The Masses, from 1911 to 1918. In 1918 he and several other Masses contributors were prosecuted under the Espionage Act by the federal government on the charge of conspiracy to obstruct the draft. After two hung juries failed to convict, the charges were dropped.
Young subsequently helped to establish a similar publication entitled Liberator. He also served as an illustrator and Washington correspondent for Metropolitan Magazine (1912-17), and from 1919 to 1921 produced another leftist journal, Good Morning, later absorbed by the Art Young Quarterly in 1922.
Young also contributed illustrations to The Nation, The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's Weekly, New Leader, New Masses, The Coming Nation, Appeal to Reason, Dawn, The Call, The New Yorker (after the 1930), and Big Stick. Of the many books he wrote, two, On My Way (1928) and Art Young: His Life and Times (1939), are autobiographical. Of special note are his series of drawings depicting Hell, published in Cosmopolitan magazine and in several books, including Through Hell With Hiprah Hunt, available at Google Books.[1] He issued a collection of his drawings, The Best of Art Young, in 1936.
[edit] References
- American Art Annual, 1927
- Dictionary of American Biography, suppl. 3
- Who Was Who in America, vol. 2
- Horn, World Encyclopedia of Cartoons
- Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses
