Jules Feiffer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist best-known for his captions... a satirist whose strong point is compassion... a humorist who mixes such unlikely subjects as nuclear destruction and sexual relationships. In less than four years Feiffer rose from the status of a struggling artist contributing free drawings to a weekly Greenwich Village newspaper to that of a cartoonist syndicated internationally.

His wry cartoon wit has stood the test of time, over 25 years of national newspaper syndication. He is the author of six plays, two novels and three movies. In addition, more than 14 collections of his cartoons have appeared in book form. Feiffer has been called “the most talented social commentator in cartooning in our generation.”

Feiffer was born in the Bronx, NY in 1929. At the age of five he won a gold medal in an art contest, a reward gained so effortlessly that it immediately set him on a career course. After high school, he enrolled at the Art Students League of New York and attended drawing classes at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

He sought employment with several comic strip artists, including Will Eisner, creator of “The Spirit,” who allowed Feiffer to write scripts for him until the aspiring cartoonist was drafted into the Army at what he claims was a slight increase in pay. From 1949 to 1951 Feiffer drew a Sunday cartoon-page feature called “Clifford,” which ran in six newspapers.

Feiffer then served a two-year stint in the Signal Corps, which he described as his passive resistance period. He spent his off hours drawing anti-military cartoons and during this time developed the character of Munro, the four-year-old boy drafted by mistake, into the Army.

After he got out of the Army, Feiffer drifted from one job to another, managing not to get fired until he worked the six months required to collect unemployment insurance. During his non-working period he turned out a book of cartoons called Sick, Sick, Sick. In April of 1958 Feiffer's Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-confident Munro was awarded The Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the best short-subject cartoon of the year. Critic Gilbert Millstein has depicted Feiffer as being "alone and unafraid in a world made of just about all of the intellectual shams and shibboleths to which our culture subscribes."

Other volumes of his collected cartoons are The Explainers, Boy Girl, Boy Girl, Hold Me!, Feiffer's Album, The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler, Feiffer on Nixon, Jules Feiffer's America: From Eisenhower to Reagan, Marriage Is An Invasion Of Privacy and Feiffer's Children. He is the author-editor of a book called The Great Comic Book Heroes, which is a memoir of his early literary influences. In 1961 he was the recipient of a special George Polk Memorial Award.

Feiffer's first full-length work for the theater was the Obie and Outer Critics Circle award-winning play Little Murders in l967. It was the first American play to be chosen for production by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, an honor repeated the next year for Feiffer's second play, God Bless. Little Murders was rated best foreign play of the year by London's drama critics. Other plays are Knock Knock, Grownups, Hold Me!, A Think Piece, Anthony Rose, Elliot Loves, and Carnal Knowledge. Both Hold Me! and Grownups were produced on Showtime. Grownups has also been presented on PBS' Great Performance series. Feiffer’s play, A Bad Friend (2003), was been commissioned by Lincoln Center.Harry the Rat with Women in 1963, and his second, Ackroyd, in 1967. He is also author of the screenplays for Little Murders, Carnal Knowledge and Popeye.

The Man in the Ceiling was Jules Feiffer's first book for children. Highly praised in The New York Times and elsewhere, it was selected by Publishers Weekly and The New York Public Library as one of the best children's books of 1993. Since then Feiffer has released A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears (1995), his first all-color picture book, Meanwhile (1997), I Lost My Bear (1998) and Bark, George (1999).

Jules Feiffer is the only cartoonist to have a comic strip published by The New York Times. Feiffer’s cartoons have also appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New Yorker.

Feiffer recently donated his papers and several hundred cartoons and manuscripts to the Library of Congress. The exhibit spanned Feiffer's entire professional career, including early cartoons for The Village Voice and manuscripts for his plays Little Murders and Carnal Knowledge.

In May of 1997, Jules Feiffer left the Village Voice following a salary dispute. He became a Senior Fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Currently he is a Contributing Editor for Vanity Fair magazine. In September 2005, Feiffer published A Room with a Zoo, his first middle-grade novel in over a decade. He currently is working on a memoir called Backing into Forward, in which he explains how his early failures inspired him to reinvent himself as an artist whose work, 50 years later, still defines him and gives him joy.