Tell Me Again Pop...

Tell Me Again Pop...

Darrow, Whitney Jr.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/12/arts/whitney-darrow-jr-89-gentle-satirist-of-modern-life-dies.html

14” x 17”

1157

Whitney Darrow Jr., a witty, gently satiric cartoonist for The New Yorker for 50 years, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Burlington, Vt. He was 89 and lived with his wife, Mildred, in Shelburne, Vt. Mr. Darrow, one of the last of the early New Yorker cartoonists -- a group that included Charles Addams, James Thurber, Peter Arno, George Price and Mary Petty -- published more than 1,500 cartoons in the magazine from 1933 to 1982. He was considered a master draftsman and, in contrast to some of his colleagues, he wrote his own captions. ''He was a great creator of comic ideas, and he avoided most of the standard cartoon cliches,'' Lee Lorenz, the former art editor of The New Yorker, said yesterday. Even away from the drawing board, Mr. Darrow was known for his sense of humor and for being shrewdly observant of the contradictions of human behavior. In the book ''The Art of the New Yorker, 1925-1995,'' Mr. Lorenz said that with the death of Charles Saxon and the retirement of Mr. Darrow, very few current contributors to the magazine ''could produce the elegant full-page tour de force that was a hallmark of these masters of the 30's and 40's.'' He added, ''Whitney Darrow's wit is as sharp as his pen.'' Often he drew upper-middle-class suburban couples he knew close-up from his many years living in Wilton, Conn., the kind of people who might appear in the comic stories of Peter De Vries, but Mr. Darrow depicted them without any sense of malice.

WSPAC - Red Cross

pen and ink

pen and ink on paper

lower right