Never too late
From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac (the only email newsletter I read every day:
It’s the birthday of cartoonist and author William Steig, (books by this author) born in New York City (1907). When he was 23, The New Yorker bought one of his cartoons for $40. It was 1930, the beginning of the Great Depression, and his father had lost his job. William said he wanted “to be a professional athlete, or to go to sea like Melville,” but he earned $4,500 his first year as a cartoonist, which he used to support the family. His cartoons are collected in books such as Small Fry (1944), Spinky Sulks (1988), and Our Miserable Life (1990). In 1990 he wrote Shrek! , about a green ogre whose name means “fear” in Yiddish and who has nightmares about fields of flowers and happy children who won’t stop hugging and kissing him. In March, Steig published his last book, When Everybody Wore a Hat, a picture-book memoir about what it was like to be eight years old in 1916.
By my calculations, Steig created Shrek! when he was 83. He passed away in 2003.
