My Friend Jules Feiffer

Jules Feiffer and I were born 94 years ago in the Bronx, two months apart. We both grew up to be terrible at sports, and we both started to draw characters from the comics when we were 8 or 9 years old. We both became cartoonists, and last year, both of us ended up in different emergency rooms with heart failure, in the same week.

After four or five days, we were both discharged from the hospital with pretty much the same array of pills, as well as orders to stay away from salt. But Jules’s doctor gave him an additional admonishment: Jules had to move far away from his home on Shelter Island. The humidity was bad for his lungs. Joan Holden, Jules’s wife, wasted no time in doing research to find out which area had the best air quality. It turned out that the air around Cooperstown, New York, was about as good as you could get, so Joan and Jules bought a house in a nearby town.

I live in Manhattan but was determined to pay Jules a visit—we have been friends for half a century, and I was the best man when Jules married Joan. And, in a way, I owe the career I’ve had as a caricaturist to Jules. His work as a cartoonist, a novelist, a playwright, and a creator of children’s books over the