Jules Feiffer has won a number of prizes for his cartoons, plays, and screenplays, including the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. His books for children include The Man in the Ceiling, A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, I Lost My Bear, Bark, George, and Meanwhile…
Feiffer’s first collection of cartoons, Sick, Sick, Sick (1958), was followed by Passionella, and Other Stories (1959). Passionella contains the character Munro, a four-year-old boy who was drafted into the army by mistake. Munro became the basis of an animated cartoon that received an Academy Award in 1961. Later cartoon collections included Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl (1961); Feiffer’s Album (1963); The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler (1965); a retrospective, Jules Feiffer’s America: From Eisenhower to Reagan (1982); Marriage Is an Invasion of Privacy (1984); and Feiffer’s Children (1986).
Feiffer also wrote satirical revues, such as The Explainers (1961) and Hold Me! (1962), and a one-act play, Crawling Arnold (1961). His full-length plays—Little Murders (1967), The White House Murder Case(1970), and Grown Ups (1981)—like his cartoons, blend farce and biting social criticism. Other literary efforts included the novels Harry, the Rat with Women (1963) and Ackroyd (1977); The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965), which he edited and annotated; and several screenplays, among them Carnal Knowledge (1971), which was directed by Mike Nichols. In addition to illustrating the popular The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), written by Norton Juster, he wrote I Lost My Bear (1998), Bark, George(1999), The House Across the Street (2002), and A Room with a Zoo (2005). His memoir, Backing into Forward, was published in 2010.