Sam Gross Dies at 89

From Wikipedia.

Photo by Rick Meyerowitz

Famed National Lampoon and New Yorker cartoonist Sam Gross died May 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

Born in the Bronx on August 7, 1933, Gross was the son of Max and Sophie, who were Jewish immigrants to America.
His mother was born in Iași, Romania and his father was born in Lithuania. His parents came to the United States as children around 1905. 

Gross' ability to draw came from his mother's artistic side of the family. His father was a CPA, which is why Gross is so well-organized.

Gross attended DeWitt Clinton High School, which at the time was an all-boys school. After he graduated, Gross went to City College. 

He started as a business major, then he wanted to be an accounting major, and finally an advertising major. Gross ended up taking a lot of art and history courses.

Sam's first cartoon in The New Yorker was published in 1963.

His cartoons have also appeared in numerous magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Penthouse, Punch, the Harvard Business Review and National Lampoon.

One of his best-remembered cartoons, published in 1970 in the National Lampoon, depicts a couple at a fancy restaurant.

 

In the National Lampoon, where Mr. Gross published more than 400 cartoons and served as cartoon editor, no subject was off-limits — race, sex, the disabled, everything.

Every Wednesday Gross would sit down to draw and, what he called, "trip".  He claimed that he did not draw for magazines or newspapers, he just drew. 

Gross averaged 16–17 drawings a week, and numbered and dated every one. 

His final total was nearly 34,000.

Once finished, he photocopied the drawings on forty-four-pound stock paper, then punched three holes and put them into loose-leaf books; 

Read also:

• "Sam Gross…1933-2023" in Inkspill.
• "Sam Gross, cartoonist of ‘radical honesty,’ dies at 89" in The Washington Post.