Background
Darrow was born on August 22, 1909, in Princeton, New Jersey. He was the son of Charles Whitney Darrow, a founding director of Princeton University Press, and May Temperance (née Barton).
10 Hillside Rd, Greenwich, CT 06830, United Kingdom
Darrow attended Greenwich High School.
Princeton, New Jersey 08544, United States
Darrow graduated in 1931 from Princeton University.
Darrow was born on August 22, 1909, in Princeton, New Jersey. He was the son of Charles Whitney Darrow, a founding director of Princeton University Press, and May Temperance (née Barton).
Darrow grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he attended Greenwich High School. He graduated in 1931 from Princeton University, where he wrote humor for the Daily Princetonian and was the art director for the Princeton Tiger Magazine.
It was while attending Princeton that Darrow first began considering life as a cartoonist. After graduation, he attended classes at the Art Students League in New York and shortly thereafter began selling cartoons to such publications Judge and Life. He sold his first cartoon to New Yorker in 1933, when he was twenty-four. Darrow retired from the magazine in 1982.
From the 1950s, Darrow worked increasingly as an illustrator, developing something of a specialty in drawing children, for books aimed at a range of readerships, both old and young. So he illustrated such adult titles as B. M. Attkinson’s What Dr Spock Didn’t Tell Us (1959) and Louise Armstrong’s A Child’s Guide to Freud (1963), and produced the images for such picture books as Robert Kraus’s Unidentified Flying Elephant (1968) and his own, I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl (1970). However, the last, which has been described as ‘the most sexist book ever’, is likely to have been satirical in intention, in undermining gender stereotypes, and so aimed at adults.
(Humorous take on Freudian psychology.)
1963(Small crease to DJ at top spine. Pages are clean and cris...)
1970The humor in Darrow's cartoons often focused on the absurdities and behavioral contradictions of middle-class suburban life, and featured characters such as judges, windbags, individuals in varying states of drunkenness, children and art.
Mr. Darrow was known for his sense of humor and for being shrewdly observant of the contradictions of human behavior.
Quotes from others about the person
“Mr. Darrow, one of the last of the early New Yorker cartoonists, published more than 1,500 cartoons in the magazine from 1933 to 1982. He was considered a master draftsman and, in contrast to some of his colleagues, he wrote his own captions." - Mel Gussow
"Darrow was a great creator of comic ideas, and he avoided most of the standard cartoon cliches." - Lee Lorenz, the former art editor of The New Yorker, said yesterday.
In 1938, Darrow married the artist, Betty Waldo Parish, whom he had probably met at the Art Students’ League, and who became best known as a printmaker. Their marriage was not a success and, in 1942, he married Mildred Lois Adkins. Together they had a son, Whitney Barton, and a daughter, Linda Ann.