Don Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning Palm Beach Post cartoonist, dies at 90

Don Wright, the former Palm Beach Post editorial cartoonist whose searing, meticulously crafted illustrations made him one of the most renowned political cartoonists of his era, died last month at his home in West Palm Beach. He was 90.

Syndicated in newspapers around the world and lauded with two Pulitzer Prizes, Wright challenged readers for a half-century with pointed barbs at world leaders, subtle humor and a distaste for hypocrisy that imbued his art with moral clarity.

His targets included presidents, congressmen, world leaders, sports figures and even religious icons. His depiction of Miami Dolphins coach Jimmy Johnson on a cross drew howls of sacrilege from some corners, as did his depiction of a menorah with missiles in the place of candles, a commentary on Israel’s military support for South Africa’s Apartheid regime.

But his talent for distilling complex global affairs into deftly drawn images attracted legions of admirers in both the general public and among his fellow cartoonists.

"For an aspiring cartoonist growing up in Florida in the mid-80s, Don Wright was a mythical figure,” said Rick McKee, a syndicated cartoonist. “His concepts and humor were sublime and his draftsmanship was simply perfection. Not a line was extraneous or wasted.”

Mr. Wright’s political views were unabashedly liberal. But his interests and subjects often outpaced the liberal consensus of his time.

He was an early critic of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of sexual predators among its clergy, recalled Eddie Sears, The Post’s editor from 1985 to 2005.

At the beginning of his cartooning career, he was a prescient critic of the Vietnam War, an overseas conflict that had a special resonance for him after serving as a drafted Army photographer.

But what set him apart more than anything, former colleagues say, was the obsessive perfectionism of his craftmanship.

“Within that rectangle on the editorial page, Don was a genius,” recalled Randy Schultz, the Post’s editorial page editor from 1990 to 2013. “He could convey so much, and I thought his best cartoons were the ones that didn’t have any words in them. He could convey so much with just the drawing. He really was just obsessive about that.”

Wright was born in 1934 in Los Angeles and moved to Miami as a boy, where he attended Miami Edison High School.

He joined the Miami News as a copy boy in 1952 and eventually became a photographer for the paper, according to a biography at Syracuse University’s Special Collections Research Center, which maintains a collection of his cartoons and correspondences.

As a photographer he took iconic photos of Mohammad Ali and Elvis Presley. He was on assignment for the paper in Cuba when the Cuban revolution began in 1953.

But both in childhood and his early newspapering days, he had been an incessant drawer and sketcher, and he began pressing the Miami News to let him publish editorial cartoons.

“He was always drawing, he was always scribbling,” recalled his wife, Carolyn Wright, a reporter at the Miami News when they met. “The drawing was an innate desire. It was there, it was natural. It was in him and it was something that he had to get out.”

He was drafted into the Army, where he served as a photographer. After a two-year stint he returned to the Miami News as a graphics editor and by the early 1960s had persuaded the paper to publish his cartoons.

In 1966, he won his first Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, for a cartoon that captured the era’s Cold War anxieties. In it, two men in tattered rags cross paths between two enormous craters on what appears to be an old battlefield. One asks the other simply, “You mean you were bluffing?”

Fourteen years later, in 1980, he won his second Pulitzer, putting him in rarefied company. Only a handful of cartoonists have won the award multiple times. In addition to the two prizes, he was also a finalist for the prize five times.

When the Miami News closed in 1988, Wright joined several colleagues in migrating north to The Post, a sister paper at the time in the Cox Newspapers chain. By then he was massive figure in the editorial cartooning world, syndicated in newspapers around the country.

“It was kind of a feather in our cap,” said Tom Giuffrida, the Post’s publisher from 1985 to 2008. “We weren’t the biggest paper in the country, but we had one of the best cartoonists in the country working for us. That was a point of pride.”

In The Post’s West Palm Beach newsroom, Wright cut a distinctive figure. Shy to the point of curtness, he worked in a private studio, laboring with obsessive focus to perfect his etchings. A night owl who eschewed distractions, he would arrive at work in the afternoon and draw until 5 a.m., leaving only to have dinner with his wife.

He worked late hours with such regularity that his wife recalled that prostitutes who walked the stretch of Dixie Highway where The Post’s office sits came to recognize his car and would wave in greeting, night workers passing in the pre-dawn hours.

“His was a work process that was a throwback to the old days,” Carolyn Wright recalled. “Sometimes he would work 12 to 18 hours a day to get the drawings exactly the way he wanted them. Nobody told him to work those hours, but he was such a total perfectionist that he would not let it go from his hands.”

Appearing in newspapers internationally, his cartoons could provoke outrage from offended readers. Schultz recalled days of angry phone calls after some of his more incendiary works.

But Wright remained uncowed.

“He wasn’t afraid to get into anything and express his opinion,” said Sears, The Post’s longtime executive editor. “But he could do it both seriously and he could do it with great humor.”

Wright left the paper in 2008, by then 74 years old and a gigantic figure in his field. For several more years he continued to publish syndicated cartoons for Tribune Media Services.

In an article about his retirement from The Post, Wright said that while his cartoons often carried a punchline, humor was never the intention.

"I'm sometimes baffled by the number of readers who believe that cartoons should be lightweight and entertainingly 'funny,’” he said. “Humor has a lot of relatives — wry, subtle, slapstick and even black — all aimed at the endless Iraq War, inept and corrupt politicians, rising unemployment, recession, Americans losing their homes, and on and on.”

"But think about it for a moment,” he added. “How funny are those?"

For all of his eviscerations of politicians, though, he said the cartoon that provoked the strongest reaction was of a very different sort. It was a drawing marking Walt Disney’s death in 1966, a depiction of several Disney characters crying.

Decades later, he recalled, he still would receive warm reactions to it.

In retirement he continued to pursue his lifelong love of tennis and worked hard to keep up his physical fitness, doing daily pushups well into his 80s. He died March 24 of natural causes.

He is survived by his wife, Carolyn; and a brother, David. His family is holding a private funeral and is planning a public memorial service to be held at a later date.

Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at amarra@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Don Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning Palm Beach Post cartoonist, dies