Profusely Illustrated

Edward Sorel, a caricaturist whose sharp pen has poked at American life for decades, tells the story of his own life through text and his artwork. The book includes more than 172 drawings, cartoons and caricatures, with prose that is as biting as the pictures. He begins in a struggling Depression-era Bronx household, where he was raised by Romanian immigrant grandparents and a large family of mostly left-leaning aunts and uncles. He recounts how pneumonia at age eight pushed him toward drawing, and his years at New York's High School of Music and Art.

The middle chapters follow his early career, including the lean beginnings of Push Pin Studios, which he co-founded with fellow Cooper Union graduates Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast. The group grew into one of the most influential design studios of the 1960s. Sorel also writes about his two marriages, his four children, and the many painters and writers he knew in New York's art and literary circles.

As he moves from being a young leftist to an older one, Sorel shows how his work in magazines, newspapers, books, murals, cartoons and comic strips mocked and praised American culture and politics. He frames his life against the succession of American presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to the present day, and shows how personal experience and political events blend together in his art.