While New Journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe was also dotting his reportage on American subcultures with fine, Daumier-like sketches, these never quite connected to his whiz-bang prose. counterculture, Vonnegut cemented that place with felt-tip pen drawings that ran throughout 1973’s Breakfast of Champions. After this science-fiction WWII epic made him a fixture of U.S. The Indiana-born novelist was always a prodigious doodler, like his mustachioed satirical predecessor Mark Twain. Vonnegut’s first drawing to appear in a book was the line drawing of a locket hanging between the breasts of teleported porn star Montana Wildhack in 1969’s Slaughterhouse Five. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Kurt Vonnegut Image taken from The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)Ī Duchamp-worthy micro-illustration, the snake/hat unfolds a strange, poetic tale that ends with an aphorism from a fox: “One sees clearly only with the heart. In telling his tale of a desert-stranded pilot’s life-changing encounter with a boy who fell to earth, the author draws visual puzzles and trompes-l’œil to evoke an alien’s child-like worldview-beginning with a single-line drawing of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant, which all adults would mistake for a hat. The slim volume became one of the most translated books ever published, due partially to its deceptively simple prose and partially to the inviting watercolors Saint-Exupéry painted for illustrations. These three strands of life wove together in the 1943 novella Le Petit Prince, an allegorical fantasy that, like Lord of the Rings, sprung from its author’s experience with wartime horror. Antoine Saint-ExupéryĪs a pilot, Saint-Exupéry was reputedly a “distracted flier,” refusing to land until he finished reading a novel, leaving his crumpled-up sketches in the cockpit afterwards. His 1999 Nobel Prize in literature suggests this hybrid worked. Grass etched his tortured vision into both his words and images, the text of his poems and prose entwined with drawings from their inception, his own art on every book cover. Thanks to the riveting painting on its cover, he gave the movement its own jagged, art brut look: Grass’s stark black brush strokes rendering his demonic hero Oskar, red triangles on the drum case, two blank blue dots for eyes. A ferociously diverse talent, the young Grass worked as a writer, graphic artist, and sculptor before founding European magic realism with his debut novel The Tin Drum in 1959. Drafted into the Waffen-SS when he was a teen, Grass waited out the war in a prison camp with a few gripes about humankind. In a sense, Grass was World War II vet J.D. Tolkien’s dust jacket design for The Hobbit (1937).Ĭourtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum. These visual creations served as a record of the world he built. He illustrated each book of his Middle Earth saga as he wrote them, creating elaborate maps of the mountains, rivers, and kingdoms, producing runic calligraphy for elvish. The serpentine ink-drawn dragon Smaug looms from the bottom of his cover. Instead of sketches, he executed his own book-jacket-sized landscape in pencil, black ink, watercolor, and gouache, the white-topped Misty Mountains backgrounding his rendition of the title’s words. Like Salinger, Tolkien rejected his publisher’s suggested cover and preferred to design it himself. Tolkien then left to work at the University of Oxford, where he killed time between lectures by inventing new languages. Tolkien led British troops at World War I’s Battle of the Somme before taking a job at the Oxford English Dictionary (where he specialized in Germanic words that began with W). TolkienĪ proficient painter since childhood, J.R.R. This is a quick survey of the highs and lows in author-executed book design. In some cases, the author’s visual output was so masterful, so distinctive, or so thoroughly integrated with his larger vision that it formed a key part of his literary persona. Tolkien, for example, not only drew the cover of his debut novel The Hobbit, but he illustrated scenes from Middle Earth (even providing a handy map to his epic’s world) and designed the mysterious runes of the characters’ elvish language. They were painters, illustrators, publishing-industry graphic designers. Some of post-war literature’s most titanic literary figures were not just pioneers of fantasy, magical realism, or counter-cultural Sci-fi. Meet some unsung graphic novelists: Kurt Vonnegut, J.R.R.
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