Don Wright, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist whose sharp work confounded and admired and resonated with ordinary readers, died March 24 at his home in Palm Beach, Fla. He is 90 years old.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Carolyn Wright, a fellow journalist.
In a 45-year career, Mr. Wright produced some 11,000 cartoons for The Miami News, which folded in 1988, and then The Palm Beach Post, where he worked until his retirement in 2008. But he reached a readership far beyond Florida: His cartoons to newspapers nationwide through syndication.
Readers of Mr. Wright where he stood, and especially what he was fighting, if it was the Vietnam War; Israel’s military support for the pro-apartheid regime in South Africa (he described a menorah with missiles in place of candles); sexual abuse by priests; the John Birch Society, the anti-Communist fringe group; and racial segregationists, especially the violent Ku Klux Klan.
The morning after winning his first Pulitzer, in 1966, Mr. Wright of a telegram from George C. Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama. “Sometimes even the worst cartoonists are countlessly decorated for their work,” it said. “If the shoe fits, wear it.” Mr. kept Wright had the telegram framed in his home.
That first prizewinning cartoon – published during the Cold War, when the world was on tenterhooks fearing nuclear Armageddon – depicted two tattered men encountering each other in a barren landscape bounded by bomb. “You mean,” one asked the other, “you were bluffed?”
His 1980 Pulitzer-winning entry depicts two Florida State prison guards carrying a corpse away from the electric chair. One asks, “Why did the governor say we’re doing this?” Another responded, “To make it clear we value human life.”
Mr. Wright was also a five-time Pulitzer finalist and the author of three books, including “Wright On! A Collection of Political Cartoons” (1971) and “Wright Side Up” (1981).
His cartoons were first syndicated by The Washington Star, then by The New York Times and finally by Tribune Media Services.
For all the ink, graphite and crayons he would painstakingly put together on an illustration board late into the night in his efforts to poke holes in popular blowhards in politics, sports and more, Mr. Wright said the single cartoon that generated the strongest response from readers was a sentimental one he drew after Walt Disney’s death in 1966. It depicted Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters in tears.
Mr. Disney’s widow, Lillian Disney, requested Mr. Wright’s original drawing for the cartoon and, when she died in 1997, bequeathed it to the Library of Congress.
In 1989, The New Yorker reported that Mr. Wright was among several American cartoonists whose work helped inspire Chinese intellectuals and businessmen in their support for that year’s student uprising in Tiananmen Square.
Donald Conway Wright was born on Jan. 23, 1934, in Los Angeles to Charles and Evelyn (Olberg) Wright. His father is an airline maintenance supervisor, and his mother manages the household.
The family moved to Florida when Don was young. He always enjoyed drawing, and, after graduating from Edison High School in Miami in 1952, he applied for a job in the art department of The Miami News. Instead, although he was already interested in cartoons, he was hired for a role in the photo department and given a camera.
He went on to take classic photos of a triumphant Fidel Castro entering Havana, a hot Elvis Presley, an imposing Cassius Clay at a Miami Beach gym before he converted to Islam and changed his name of Muhammad Ali, and an ambitious Senator John F. Kennedy in a hotel room wearing a suit jacket, tie and boxer shorts.
Self-taught as a photographer and illustrator, Mr. Wright has the craftsmanship of a photographer and eye for detail in the creativity of an illustrator.
“He was always drawing, he was always writing,” recalled Ms. Wright, her husband, who was a reporter at The Miami News when they met.
After serving in the Army, Mr. Wright at The Miami News and, when the paper’s editors worried he would leave if he wasn’t transferred, began publishing some of his cartoons and assigned him to the art department as a graphics editor. By 1963 his cartoons were appearing regularly on the editorial page.
In 1989 he was hired by The Post, which was owned, like The News, by Cox Newspapers.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Wright had a younger brother, David.
Mr. admitted Wright that not all of his cartoons are home runs.
“You’re on a deadline,” he told The Times in 1994, “and you have three ideas, and you throw away the first, and you throw away the second, and you’re running out of time, and the sooner you know, the better the cliché.”
When he retired from The Post, he explained that although his cartoons often had a punchline, his goal was not to be funny.
“I am sometimes baffled by the number of readers who believe that cartoons should be light and entertaining ‘funny,'” Mr. Wright said. “Humor has many relatives – wry, subtle, slapstick and even black – all aimed at the never-ending Iraq War, incompetent and corrupt politicians, rising unemployment, recession, Americans who have lost of their homes, and so on.”
“But think about it for a moment,” he added. “How funny are those?”
