Gluyas Williams

Gluyas Williams (1888-1982) was born in San Francisco and educated at Harvard, where his first drawings were published in the school’s humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon. Following his graduation, Williams studied life drawing in Paris for six months, and upon his return to the United States decided to follow the example of his older sister, Kate Carew, who was enjoying success as a newspaper illustrator. After a failed attempt at a daily strip for the Boston Journal he took a job as the head of the art department for a youth magazine while he did freelance cartoon work which found its way into Collier’s and Life magazines. Starting in 1922, Williams began a collaboration with writer, Robert Benchley (the two met at Harvard’s Lampoon).  Over the next 20 years, Benchley would publish a dozen or so compilations of his essays; Gluyas Williams illustrated them all, forever linking the two creators.  In 1924, Williams sold a single panel daily cartoon gag series to Bell Syndicate, which distributed the feature nationwide for the next 25 years under the titles "The World at its Worst", "The Family Album", "The Minute that Seems a Year", "Snapshots", and "Suburban Heights".  Upon Harold Ross’s founding of the New Yorker in 1925, Ross reached out to Williams directly to provide cartoons for the magazine.  Williams regularly contributed cartoons to the New Yorker from 1926 through 1951, where they often occupied full pages, including the famed “Industrial Crisis,” featuring the frantic board members of Proctor & Gamble gathered around a pool in which a bar of Ivory soap had sunk.  Willams is said to have been one of Ross’s favorites.