Backing into Forward: A Memoir »

Beloved children s book author Jules Feiffer didn t start out with kid-friendly fare. After first gaining notoriety -- and a Pulitzer Prize -- for his stark, darkly comic political cartoons, he redrew himself as the creator of such charming kids tales as I m Not Bobby! and The House Across the Street.

The award-winning cartoonist, playwright, and author delivers a witty, illustrated rendition of his life, from his childhood as a wimpy kid in the Bronx to his legendary career in the arts.

 A gifted storyteller who has delighted readers and theater audiences for decades, Jules Feiffer now turns his talents to the tale of his own life.

 Plagued by learning problems, a controlling mother, and a debilitating sense of fear, Feiffer embarked on his first cartoon apprenticeship at the age of seventeen, emboldened only by a passion for success and an aptitude for failure. He vividly recalls those transformative years working under the legendary Will Eisner, and later, after he was drafted into the army, his evolution from “smart-ass kid into an enraged satirist.” Backing into Forward also traces Feiffer's love life, from a doomed hitchhiking trip to reclaim his high-school sweetheart to losing his virginity in Greenwich Village, and his road to marriage and fatherhood.

 At the center of this journey is Feiffer's prolific creativity. In dazzling detail, he recounts the birth of his subversive graphic novella Munro, his entrée into New York's literary salons, collaborations with film greats Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, and Jack Nicholson, and other major turning points. Brimming with wry punch lines, slices of Americana, and pithy social commentary, Backing into Forward charts Feiffer's rise as an unlikely and incisive provocateur during the conformist fifties and the Vietnam and Civil Rights sixties and seventies.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Jules Feiffer's had a pretty remarkable career over the past 60 years or so. After becoming the pioneering cartoonist Will Eisner's assistant as a teenager, he drew a long-running, ferocious comic strip for the Village Voice (initially called "Sick, Sick, Sick," later just "Feiffer"), wrote a series of plays, novels and screenplays, and eventually settled into creating children's books. This lively, digressive memoir details his evolution from skinny, put-upon Bronx Jewish kid to skinny, put-upon, world-renowned satirist, by way of stints on the open road and in the Army; it's the equivalent of listening to a terrific raconteur's well-polished anecdotes.

Like his characters, Feiffer's got a superiority complex that keeps colliding with an inferiority complex, and a knack for turning neurotic self-examination into comedy: an agonizing stomachache he describes abruptly disappearing when he finally admits out loud that he hates his mother could have come straight out of one of his early cartoons. Even after he's achieved fame, he seems hardly able to believe that he's in the same circle as other bold-face names -- there's a hilarious bit about watching Marlene Dietrich and Kenneth Tynan discuss "Papa" Hemingway ("Apparently, I was the only one at the table who knew I was a fraud").

After Backing Into Forward gets past the early-years-of-bitter-struggle part of Feiffer's story, he's got fewer stories to relate. The process of writing his 1967 play "Little Murders" at Yaddo is more or less the climax of the book; the subsequent forty years of his career are relegated to the book's final fifty pages. But the fun part of Backing Into Forward is less thedetails of Feiffer's work, and his brushes with other notables, than his keen-edged, blood-speckled wit, which he turns on himself as often as on the cruel world around him.