NEW YORK, NY.- Don Wright, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist whose pointed work punctured duplicity and pomposity and resonated with common-sense readers, died March 24 at his home in Palm Beach, Florida. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Carolyn Wright, a fellow journalist.
In a 45-year career, Wright drew about 11,000 cartoons for The Miami News, which folded in 1988, and then The Palm Beach Post, where he worked until he retired in 2008. But he reached a readership far beyond Florida: His cartoons appeared in newspapers nationwide through syndication.
Wright’s readers knew where he stood, and especially what he was against, whether it was the Vietnam War; Israel’s military support for the pro-apartheid regime in South Africa (he depicted a menorah with missiles in place of candles); sexual abuse by clergymen; the John Birch Society, an anti-communist fringe group; and racial segregationists, notably the violent Ku Klux Klan.
The morning after winning his first Pulitzer, in 1966, Wright received a telegram from George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama.
“Sometimes even the meanest cartoonists are unaccountably decorated for their work,” it said. “If the shoe fits, wear it.” Wright kept the telegram framed in his home.
That first prizewinning cartoon — published during the Cold War, when the world was on tenterhooks fearing nuclear Armageddon — depicted two men in tatters encountering each other on a barren landscape cratered by bombs. “You mean,” one asks the other, “you were just bluffing?”
His 1980 Pulitzer-winning entry depicted two Florida prison guards carrying a corpse away from the electric chair. One asks, “Why did the governor say we’re doing this?” The other replies, “To make it clear we value human life.”
Wright was also a Pulitzer finalist five times and the author of three books, including “Wright On! A Collection of Political Cartoons” (1971) and “Wright Side Up” (1981).
His cartoons were syndicated first by The Washington Star, then by The New York Times and finally by Tribune Media Services.
For all the ink, graphite and crayon he would meticulously combine on an illustration board late into the night in his efforts to pierce celebrity blowhards in politics, sports and beyond, Wright often said the single cartoon that generated the strongest response from readers was a sentimental one that he drew after the death of Walt Disney in 1966. It depicted Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters in tears.
Disney’s widow, Lillian Disney, requested Wright’s original drawing for the cartoon and, when she died in 1997, bequeathed it to the Library of Congress.
In 1989, The New Yorker reported that Wright was among several American cartoonists whose work had helped inspire Chinese intellectuals and businessmen in their support for the student uprising that year in Tiananmen Square.
Donald Conway Wright was born on Jan. 23, 1934, in Los Angeles to Charles and Evelyn (Olberg) Wright. His father was an airline maintenance supervisor, and his mother managed the household.
The family moved to Florida when Don was a child. He always enjoyed drawing, and, after graduating from Edison High School in Miami in 1952, he applied for a job in the art department of The Miami News. Instead, although he was already enamored of cartoons, the paper hired him for the photo department and gave him a camera.
He went on to capture classic images of a triumphant Fidel Castro entering Havana, a sizzling Elvis Presley, an imposing Cassius Clay in a Miami Beach, Florida, gym before he converted to Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, and an ambitious Sen. John F. Kennedy in a hotel room wearing a suit jacket, a tie and boxer shorts.
Self-taught as both a photographer and an illustrator, Wright combined a photographer’s craftsmanship and eye for detail with an illustrator’s creativity.
“He was always drawing, he was always scribbling,” recalled Carolyn Wright, his wife, who was a reporter at The Miami News when they met.
After serving in the Army, Wright returned to The Miami News and, when the paper’s editors became concerned that he would leave if he wasn’t transferred, began publishing some of his cartoons and assigned him to the art department as a graphics editor. By 1963 his cartoons were appearing regularly on the editorial page.
In 1989 he was hired by the Post, which was owned, as the News had been, by Cox Newspapers.
In addition to his wife, Wright’s survivors include a younger brother, David.
Wright acknowledged that not every cartoon of his was a home run.
“You’re on a deadline,” he told the Times in 1994, “and you have three ideas, and you throw out the first one, and you throw out the second, and you’re running out of time, and before you know it, the cliché is looking better.”
When he retired from the Post, he explained that although his cartoons often had a punchline, his goal was not to be humorous.
“I’m sometimes baffled by the number of readers who believe that cartoons should be lightweight and entertainingly ‘funny,’” Wright said. “Humor has a lot of relatives — wry, subtle, slapstick and even black — all aimed at the endless Iraq War, inept and corrupt politicians, rising unemployment, recession, Americans losing their homes, and on and on.
“But think about it for a moment,” he added. “How funny are those?”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
