Art Young: His Life and Times #[nn]
Art Young: His Life and Times (1939) is the definitive primary-source document of one of American cartooning's most consequential radical voices — a 467-page illustrated memoir that collects decades of Young's black-line satirical cartoons alongside his autobiographical text, making it an irreplaceable archive of early-twentieth-century left-wing visual culture. Published four years before Young's death, it stands as both a capstone to his sixty-year cartooning career and a candid chronicle of his transformation from apolitical Republican to avowed socialist, framing that ideological journey through the cartoons themselves. The book preserves work that originally appeared in venues ranging from mainstream humor weeklies to the radical magazine The Masses (1911–1917), giving readers a single-volume survey of how political cartooning could function as genuine social protest. Because Young's imagery — including his depictions of Christ as a laboring figure of Nazareth and his skewering of war profiteers and capitalist press barons — had already shaped progressive visual rhetoric for a generation, the autobiography serves as a key document in the history of comics-adjacent sequential and satirical art in America.
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The autobiography was written by Arthur Henry Young (January 14, 1866 – December 29, 1943) and edited by labor journalist and activist John Nicholas Beffel, with Sheridan House of New York publishing the first edition in 1939. Young had already produced an earlier autobiographical book, On My Way (1928), but His Life and Times is far more comprehensive, running to xii + 467 pages with illustrated endpapers, a frontispiece, and numerous reproductions of his cartoons integrated throughout the text. The book draws directly on Young's decades of experience contributing to publications such as The Masses, The New Masses, The New Yorker, Collier's Weekly, and The Nation, as well as his two trials under the Espionage Act (1918), his Socialist Party candidacies, and his friendships with figures like Max Eastman, John Reed, and Floyd Dell. Young's papers, which include much of the source material behind the memoir, are held at the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published by Sheridan House, New York, 1939; first and only original edition runs xii + 467 pages with illustrated endpapers and a frontispiece.
- Written by Art Young (Arthur Henry Young, 1866–1943) and edited by labor journalist John Nicholas Beffel.
- The book is Young's second autobiography, following On My Way (1928), and is the more comprehensive of the two, covering his full career arc from Wisconsin boyhood through his late-1930s political activism.
- The volume reproduces numerous black-and-white cartoon illustrations from Young's career, including work originally published in The Masses (1911–1917), The New Masses, Collier's Weekly, The Nation, and The New Yorker.
- Young's famous depiction of Christ as 'the Workingman of Nazareth' — first published in The Masses in 1913 — is among the recurring images associated with his body of work that the autobiography documents and contextualizes.
- Young details his two federal Espionage Act trials (1918) alongside Max Eastman, John Reed, Floyd Dell, and others, one of the most consequential free-speech legal battles in American cartooning history.
- Young's papers, which underpin the memoir's historical record, are housed at the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
- The book has been reproduced in multiple print-on-demand facsimile reprints and is also available in digitized form via the Internet Archive, extending its reach to researchers well beyond the original print run.