Political cartoon by Rollin Kirby portraying a bloodstained Hitler standing on a pile of human skulls

Rollin Kirby was born in Galva, Illinois, on September 4, 1875, to George Washington Kirby and Elizabeth Maddox. His father had a shoe store. When Kirby was nineteen, he moved to New York to study painting at the Art Students League. He then went to Paris, France, to study at the Academie Julian and the Ecole Des Beaux Arts. He had a gallery show of his paintings at the National Academy in New York when he returned, but in 1901, in order to make a living, he turned to commercial art. He became a magazine illustrator, publishing work in Colliers, Harper’s, Scribner’s, and other popular publications. In 1903, he married Estelle Carter and they had one daughter.
He began to focus on cartoon drawing in 1911, as he was tiring of work he found routine. By 1914, his editorial cartoons were appearing daily in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. He gained fame as a political cartoonist while working for the New York World from 1913-1931. Following World War I (1914-1918) he was recognized as America’s leading political cartoonist and won three Pulitzer Prizes in 1922, 1925, and 1929; his 1922 award was the first award in this category created to recognize the importance of political and social satire in the US. Kirby was known for his bold and deceptively simple graphic style and for the clever and inventive symbolism he used in his images. He stayed on in 1931 when the New York World merged with The World Telegram, but in 1939 he went to the New York Post, where he remained until 1942. He continued creating visual commentaries on daily life and his work appeared in Look magazine and The New York Times Sunday Magazine. He stood for the common man and supported civil rights and the New Deal against such forces as big business, corrupt politicians, Hitler and fascism, and the Ku Klux Klan. He was a cartoonist for whom the idea mattered most. He also wrote articles, poetry, and plays. Kirby, age 73, died on May 8, 1952 in New York City, New York.