PHILADELPHIA – Tony Auth, 72, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and mainstay of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial page for four decades before resigning in 2012 to become a digital artist, died Sunday.
Auth had been under treatment for metastatic brain cancer. David Leopold, his friend and curator, said he died at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, four days after his supporters announced a fundraising effort for an archive devoted to his work at Temple University.
Auth’s career began in 1971 when the fledgling artist from California flew in to Philadelphia to interview for the position of editorial cartoonist.
Editorial board chief Creed Black seemed hostile to every point Auth raised. So he was surprised and elated when Black called him in California to offer him the cartoonist job: “We missed hearing your point of view,” Auth said Black told him.
Over the next 41 years, Auth would use his rapier wit in thousands of carefully rendered drawings to kindle discussion on the political and cultural currents of the day. Few could look at an Auth cartoon and stay mute.