The New York Times reports cartoonist Dana Fradon has passed away at age 97 from liver cancer. He worked as a cartoonist for The New Yorker from 1948 to 2003, where he created nearly 1400 cartoons. He died in his home in New York on October 3rd.
Dana Fradon was born in Chicago on April 14th, 1922, to Norman and Minnie Fradon, both of whom were Russian immigrants. Some of his earliest work was for The New Masses, a Marxist magazine, before publishing his first cartoon under The New Yorker in 1948. Although he had a brief hiatus in the 1990s due to editorial differences, Fradon’s career was centered around The New Yorker and had arguably made him an inextricable part of the magazine’s identity.
Fradon was present near The New Yorker’s beginning, working under founding editor Harold Ross, and his career stretched all the way to the modern day under current editor David Remnick. His unique style of left-leaning satire defined The New Yorker’s postwar tone. Fradon remained a consistently topical cartoonist for his full 55-year tenure.
He worked alongside similarly esteemed cartoonists like Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, Peter Arno, James Stevenson, Robert Weber, Charles Saxon, Anatol Kovarsky, Frank Modell, Roz Chast and Bob Mankoff. Mankoff said “I don’t think there was ever a cartoonist who was as consistently good as he was … There was a great clarity to his style.”
“The society I seek,” he said in his 1978 book Insincerely Yours, “is the society given lip service to by one and all. Governed by the Boy Scout oath, the West Point oath and the Golden Rule, it is populated by warmhearted TV Waltons, and protected from harm by honest Starskys and Hutches.”
Fradon is survived by his daughter Amy Fradon and ex-wife Ramona Fradon.
