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He was born in Superior, Wisconsin, the son of Patrick Fitzpatrick, the owner of a millwork factory, and Delia Ann Clark. Fitzpatrick learned dexterity with tools working in his father's plant, in a Superior shipyard, and on a Great Lakes iron-ore carrier. Fitzpatrick wanted to be a cartoonist from the age of ten.
During his years in Blaine High School in Superior, he drew for the school paper and submitted cartoons to the Telegram.
In 1906 he dropped out of high school.
He studied for three years at the Chicago Art Institute.
Therefore, Fitzpatrick moved to St. Louis, where he continued his art studies at Washington University and began a forty-five-year, 14, 000-cartoon career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
In 1906 he dropped out of high school. He said that his early interest in history had not been encouraged, because teachers emphasized dates and statistics rather than meaning. Later, his work would be distinguished because he chose to emphasize the significance of events in broad strokes rather than cluttering his drawings with distracting details.
Fitzpatrick learned dexterity with tools working in his father's plant, in a Superior shipyard, and on a Great Lakes iron-ore carrier. He studied for three years at the Chicago Art Institute. When his family stopped providing financial help, he supported himself with odd jobs and with drawings that were occasionally accepted by the Chicago Daily News.
In 1911, L. D. Bradley, the Daily News editorial cartoonist and head of the art department, hired Fitzpatrick to do sports layouts, comic panels, and illustrations. During his three years at the Daily News, sophisticated newspapermen encouraged him to see his work in a larger context and encouraged his reading. After serving for nine months as editorial cartoonist while Bradley was ill, Fitzpatrick did not want to return to a lesser position.
Therefore, Fitzpatrick moved to St. Louis, where he continued his art studies at Washington University and began a forty-five-year, 14, 000-cartoon career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Fitzpatrick's mature work was influenced by Goya, Forain, Daumier, Hogarth, Rembrandt, and Dore, as well as by the cartoonists he followed as a youngster.
Perhaps the greatest influence was the tradition already established at the Post-Dispatch by Robert Minor, Jr. , who preceded Fitzpatrick as editorial cartoonist. Minor's drawings, like Boardman Robinson's cartoons for the New York Sun, which Fitzpatrick also admired, represented a radical departure from the sentimental style of the "bucolic school" of midwestern cartoonists such as John T. McCutcheon of the Chicago Tribune and Jay ("Ding") Darling of the Des Moines Register.
McCutcheon's and Darling's panels, filled with detailed figures, cross-hatching, and labels and words in balloons, all drawn in fine-line pen and ink, were most frequently local, good-natured, and only mildly critical. With the rise of realism, urbanism, the ashcan school of art, and post-World War I disillusionment, Fitzpatrick followed Robinson and Minor, further developing their dramatic "dripping mud" style.
Fitzpatrick's cartoons featured a few bold symbolic figures drawn in grease pencil on heavy, grained paper. Although he could also be amusing, the most effective of Fitzpatrick's drawings are somber in mood and subject. The new simplified shadowy style that made the editorial point primary was appropriate to Fitzpatrick's indignation at social wrongs and oppression.
More typical of his dark style were his compassionate portrayals of lost men suffering from poverty after the Great Depression and his ominous World War II drawings of giant swastikas rolling relentlessly across Europe.
While his international reputation was based on his stark cartoons dealing with global issues, he sometimes adopted a fussier nostalgic style to expose local corruption. He was convicted of contempt after supporting the editorial policy of the Post-Dispatch with a cartoon from his Rat Alley series that chastised the courts for releasing an alleged extortionist.
The Missouri Supreme Court reversed the conviction. In the citation accompanying a 1949 degree from Washington University, he was credited with an "instinctive intolerance of self-interest and bigotry" and for speaking "eloquently for a better community and a better world. "
His agreement with Joseph Pulitzer that he would not have to draw cartoons to support editorial policies with which he could not agree led him to take special leave only twice in his career--when the Post-Dispatch supported Alfred M. Landon against Franklin D. Roosevelt and again when the paper favored Thomas E. Dewey over Harry S. Truman.
He retired in 1958 and was succeeded by Bill Mauldin.
He died in St. Louis.
Fitzpatrick cartoons were syndicated in thirty-five newspapers in the United States and have been reproduced, collected, and exhibited all over the world. In the 1930's his works were hung in the Moscow Museum of Modern Western Art, and his No Place for a Kiddie Car (March 29, 1940) became part of the White House collection during the Truman administration.
Fitzpatrick was a liberal Democrat, but his opposition to injustice crossed partisan lines.
Quotes from others about the person
The obituary in the Post-Dispatch described Fitzpatrick as "an incisive interpreter of the times and a fearless crusader" who brought to his daily work "a controlled passion, a mordant sense of humor, an informed skepticism, and above all the fierce independence of a man not easily tamed to conventional rhetoric and conventional ideas. "
In September 1913, having just married Lee Anna Dressen. Fitzpatrick's wife died in 1965, and he married Beulah O. Hawthorne in December 1968.
