An Evening with Tomi Ungerer and Jules Feiffer

June 09, 2011

This once in a lifetime event paired up two award-winning, iconic illustrators as they reflected and discussed their careers, art, and works in children’s literature.

Tomi Ungerer started drawing as a small boy in the Alsace region of France. Growing up in Nazi-occupied Strasbourg, he moved to New York in 1956. He first made his mark in American children’s literature when The Mellops Go Flying was published in 1957 by Harper & Row. He went on to publish more than 80 books over a wide range of topics, and win the Hans Christian Anderson Award for Illustration. His work has appeared in The New York Times and in numerous advertising campaigns. He now divides his time between his farm in Ireland, and Strasbourg, where a museum dedicated to his work opened in late 2007.

Jules Feiffer is well known for his long-running editorial cartoons that appeared in The Village Voice. He has also created works for the stage, screen, and numerous books for children. His work has won him many awards including a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, an Obie, and a George Polk Award. His recent memoir, Backing Into Forward (Doubleday), looks at his career and the struggles with failure that made him reinvent himself as an artist over and over.