LIVE from NYPL: GRAPHIC ART: Nicholson Baker and Art Spiegelman

Date and Time
November 7, 2005
Event Details

Nicholson Baker and Art Spiegelman discuss the graphic art of Joseph Pulitzer's colorful, chaotic turn-of-the-century newspaper, the New York World.

About Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended The Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. Baker and his wife, Margaret Brentano, co-author of The World on Sunday (2005), founded the American Newspaper Repository in 1999 in order to save a large collection of U.S. newspapers. The collection includes bound runs of the New York Tribune, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Joseph Pulitzer's influencial daily, the New York World. In 2004 the Repository's holdings became a gift to Duke University.

Baker has published seven novels--The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, The Everlasting Story of Nory, A Box of Matches, and Checkpoint--and three works of nonfiction, U and I, The Size of Thoughts, and Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been published by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, American Libraries, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays. Baker and Brentano live in Maine.

About Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1948. He began drawing professionally at age 16 and went on to study at Harpur College before becoming part of the underground comics movement. Spiegelman worked as a creative consultant for Topps Candy and taught at SVA in New York. He founded RAW, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Francoise Mouly and was a staff artist and writer for The New Yorker where much of his work was published.

Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his Holocaust narrative, Maus. He has been honored with a Guggenheim fellowship and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the Shadow of No Towers was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004. He published Open Me... I'm A Dog and the illustration accompaniment to the 1928 book The Wild Party, by Joseph Moncure March. This year, Art Spiegelman was made a Chevalier de l Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. He is working on "Drawn to Death: A Three Panel Opera" with composer Phillip Johnston. Speigelman currently edits Little Lit, and has completed an anthology of his New Yorker work, Kisses from New York. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.