This Hardcover Book item from Random House was reviewed on 16-Oct-2008. Search ISBN:0679463259 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life Reference Book. Classifications : Artists, Architects & Photographers Arts & Literature Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books General Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books Cartooning Comics & Graphic Novels Subjects Books Satire Humor E . Click the following link to view the cover of Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life. Related topics: Arts & Literature. Subjects. Books. General. Subjects. Books. Cartooning. Subjects. Books. Satire. requestid: e1b8f0ed-9c83-4130-ab4e-51109b68d0fb
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1) Hardcover Book Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Random House. My dad and Charlie were in business during their undergraduate days at UPenn. Dad would go out and take orders and Charlie would draw custom Christmas "and other special occasion" cards. I thought this was pretty neat. Nearing his deathbed, my dad finally confessed the he´d go out and take very specific instructions, gather photos, descriptions, etc. and bring other sordid details back to Charlie, who would then draw "pornographic" cards based on those orders. That revelation got me looking at Wednesday in a whole new light! It was enjoyable to read that Charlie was like that all his life.
¤ 2) Hardcover Book Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Random House. Who was Chas (Charles) Adams? While you won´t know by the time you finish this revealing biography, you´ll certainly expand beyond the line sketch you probably have now of his life. If you are a New Yorker fan, you´ll know him from his hundreds of cartoons and dozens of covers that expressed a most unique and other worldly perspective. If you are a fan of celebrities, you may know more about him as someone who drove classic cars, dated high-profile women, and favored allusions to death and dying. If you are a classic television fan, you´ll know that his cartoon characters were the foundation for The Addams Family. If you favor camp, you know about his armor collection, his preferences for cross-bows, and other lethal items which he liked to display in public.
The biography also reveals a kindly man who was patient with everyone, including those he didn´t particularly like. You´ll also learn of his fascination with the Morticia appearance (based on having married two women who met the bill). More surprisingly, you´ll find him to have been victimized by his second wife . . . even long after they were no longer married. The book also portrays a heterosexual version of Truman Capote who fascinated many of the most desirable women.
Most pleasingly, Ms. Davis does a delightful job of portraying the development of his cartooning style and art . . . including dozens of prime examples that are well reproduced. Even when there´s no reproduction, Ms. Davis is good at capturing the essence of an image in a few words. She also provides a history of 20th century New Yorker cartooning, including how many of the final cartoons represented the influences of many people other than the artist who signed the final version.
While each of those aspects is well and thoroughly portrayed, the core of the man doesn´t quite make it through. Addams seems like a case of arrested development in many ways, but his willingness to be kind and considerate of others displays greater maturity than his preferences for self-indulgence and his cartooning approach suggest. In today´s world, he would clearly be just another clever self-promoter . . . except that his stunts seemed aimed at creating joy rather than a higher income. Clearly, he didn´t take himself too seriously, yet he did take his work seriously. Ms. Davis has, however, done readers and cartoon fans a great service by writing this biography which will undoubtedly stir up other sources and perspectives to flesh out the man who shortened his first name because it looked better that way on a cartoon.¤ 3) Hardcover Book Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Random House. One of the most commonly asked questions of cartoonists is, "Where do you get your ideas?"
And of course when the cartoonist is Charles Addams, this question leads to unrivaled speculation and disinformation, which over the years created its own brand of peculiar mythology.
Now comes an impressive new biography by Linda H. Davis. In "Charles Addams: A Cartoonist´s Life" Davis takes on the stories that Addams slept in a coffin and drank martinis with eyeballs in them. Instead, what emerges is a surprising portrait of an amazing artist who led a full and colorful life.
Yes, Addams certainly had quirks and odd obsessions. But he was also universally loved, and so charming that he dated the likes of such luminaries of his time as Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine and Jackie Kennedy Onassis (along with untold numbers of others). He drank hard, raced cars, and no party or social gathering was considered complete without him. His fan base ran the gamut from the criminally insane to Sean Connery and Alfred Hitchcock.
In this first ever biography of the subject, Davis charts Addams´ meteoric rise and more than 50-year career as the most esteemed cartoonist at The New Yorker. With his cartoons, Addams became a significant cultural force by combining horror and humor, a genre that continues to flourish today. His impact and influence on generations of cartoonists is impossible to calculate, but it´s fair to say that Gary Larson´s Far Side would not have existed without him.
Addams´ own unique creation of The Addams Family began as print cartoons which went on to inspire a popular TV series, animated cartoons and two Hollywood feature films. With these characters, Addams provided role models for eccentrics and nonconformists everywhere. The message of the Addams Family was simple: Namely that love and laughter can--and does-- flourish everywhere, even within families and social groups that seem outside society´s norms.
An esteemed biographer whose previous subjects have included Stephen Crane and Katherine White, Davis spent over six years on this book and interviewed more than 130 persons who knew Addams well, or as well as anyone could. Although Addams died in 1988, Davis had exclusive access to his personal effects and papers that had been in the possession of his wife Tee until her death in 2004. Addams´ two other wives also participated in helping Davis to define the man nicknamed "Chill" by his friends.
Davis provides a wealth of detail, but wisely avoids drawing hard conclusions or offering up pseudo-psychoanalysis. Instead, the dichotomy between the artist´s urbane and cheerful public persona and his morbidly dark humor are presented in a way that leaves the reader, if nothing else, even more appreciative of Addams´ depth, genius and mystery.
With this approach Davis reframes the question of "where" Addams got his ideas to that of "why." Addams was unlike anyone else, and so it is only natural that his ideas would be unlike those of others. As for why he was the way he was, that´s a question Addams seems to have taken to the grave with him. In "A Cartoonist´s Life" we see that just as one question is put to rest, another rises up - a conclusion that Addams himself would have no doubt enjoyed.¤ 4) Hardcover Book Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Random House. Addams has always been my favorite cartoonist and I snatched a copy of this book as soon as I saw it. Reading this book led me to have even more admiration for this man, who had a rather energetic personal life (although not of the sort some might imagine) and who also served in the Army as, what else, an illustrator.
A must-have for anyone interested in Addams´ work and a damn good read even if you aren´t. Also, I thought the cartoons picked to illustrate the book were a perfect for this work.¤ 5) Hardcover Book Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Random House. "Charles Addams: A Cartoonist´s Life" is a warm and tenderly written biography in which the essence of the man behind the dark side of his cartoons is gently exposed. Author Linda H. Davis has offered a comprehensive look into Charles Addams´s life and it has a few surprises.
Addams, born into relative prosperity in Westfield, New Jersey just prior to World War I, could have lived a rarefied life (and in some ways he did) were it not for his penchant for seeing the world in a different way from most of us. Davis points out that Addams, although never admitting to liking children and never having any of his own, nonetheless gravitated toward children at parties and visits to friends´ homes. He was wildly popular with the children he got to know and that childlike quality is evident in the cartoons he drew. He disliked the word "macabre" in describing his work and as the author points out there is never any outward blood and gore in his cartoons. The ghoulishness is implied and having been treated to several of Addams´s cartoons in this book I would agree with Addams himself....his best cartoons are uncaptioned.
Charles Addams´s personal life was another matter. Married three times, his second wife, Barbara Colyton, had the most and longest lasting effect on him. Control and money were her issues and she dominated the cartoonist for years after their divorce. Yet as Davis points out, Addams never had too much of an axe to grind with her or other women in his life. Indeed, he had many women as confidants...something most men eschew.
It is surprising to see how little money Addams made in his life, relatively speaking. He seemed to care about other things and one of the great loves of his life was his dog, Alice. Remarkably, too, Addams lived in an age where, at the New Yorker at least, cartoonists were mostly given ideas from which to draw something. It appears that his originality came later rather than earlier in his career.
Linda Davis has done a fine job in taking us through the life of this wonderfully warm, if complicated man. As his friend, the writer Philip Hamburger remarked on Addams´s death in 1988, "Charles Addams was ´sui generis´". Without a doubt he must have been. I think Addams would have been a lovely dinner guest, replete with humor and full of attentive, quiet listening to his fellow guests. I wish I had met him.¤ 6) Hardcover Book Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Random House. “They’re creepy and they’re kooky,” is how the catchy theme song of The Addams Family described everyone’s favorite nonconformists–Morticia, Gomez, Lurch, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, Wednesday, and Pugsley. But for all the novelty of the sitcom based on Charles Addams’s groundbreaking New Yorker cartoons, Hollywood’s Addams family paled beside the cartoonist’s. “Not half as evil as my original characters,” sighed Addams.
Though the haunted-household cartoons developed a following among New Yorker readers long before the 1960s sitcom, and the Addams and their seedy Victorian mansion soon became recognizable types, the artist with the well-known signature “Chas Addams” remained an enigma. Called “the Bela Lugosi of the cartoonists,” Addams was the cartoonist everyone–even Hitchcock–wanted to meet. He was bedeviled by rumors. People claimed that he slept in a coffin, collected severed fingers sent by fans, and suffered bouts of madness that sent him to the insane asylum.
The true Addams was even more fabulous than the wildest stories and cartoons. Here was a sunny, funny urbane man, “a normal American boy,” as he called himself, with a dog who hated children and a taste for crossbows. While producing a unique body of work featuring lovingly drawn homicidal spouses, demonic children, genteel monsters, and an everyday world crosshatched with magic, Addams raced classic sports cars, juggled beautiful women (Joan Fontaine, Jackie Kennedy, and Greta Garbo, to name a few), and charmed everyone. But though his pursuits suggest lighthearted romantic comedy, Addams’s life had its sinister side. Far darker than anything Addams created with a brush was his relationship with a dangerous woman who forever changed his life.
In this first biography of the great cartoonist, written with exclusive access to Addams’s intimates and his private papers, we finally meet the man behind the famed cartoons and circling rumors. Here is his surprising childhood in New Jersey, the cartoon that offended the Nazis, the friend whose early death Addams long mourned. Here are his wives, the stories behind his most famous–and some of his most private–cartoons, and the Addams whom even his closest friends didn’t know.
With wit, humor, poignancy, and insight–enhanced by rare family photographs, classic and previously unpublished cartoons, and private drawings–Linda H. Davis paints an engaging and endearing portrait of a marvelous American original.
One of America’s most gifted biographers, Linda Davis has given us an engrossing, unforgettable portrait of the legendary New Yorker cartoonist. In Davis’s empathetic narrative and in accompanying cartoons, photographs, and drawings, the great artist lives again in all his eccentric brilliance,
ghoulish sense of humor, fecund love life, and warm and gentle humanity. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, Chas Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life deserves to win every literary prize there is for best biography.--Stephen B. Oates, Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography and Professor History Emeritus, The University of Massachusetts at Amherst
“If you don’t appreciate martinis with eyeballs in them, this is not the book for you. For the rest of us here is an irresistible riot of a read, an exhilarating expertly mixed cocktail of words and images. Charles Addams’s life was crowded with women–famous women, smart women, witty women, garden-variety drop-dead beautiful women–but in Linda Davis he has truly met his match.” --Stacy Schiff, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Vera
“Seldom have we found as satisfying a fit of subject and author as this. Linda Davis has distilled years of research, travel and interviews into a rollicking and fascinating review of Addams’s astonishing life as artist, playboy and–from time to time–husband. We can all be grateful that Addams and Davis finally found one another.”--Harrison Kinney,
author of James Thurber: His Life and Times
¤ Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 13-Nov-2008, 06794632599780679463252, 590-530-7X0-710-SQB-5WB-8 
Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life, Book, Image © Random House
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