The richest illustrator of her time, the earliest writing, and year-end reactions from readers: newsletter, January 3, 2020

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Rose O’Neill, creator of the Kewpie doll and the richest illustrator of her time

In 1887 when she was 13, Rose O’Neill entered a drawing contest sponsored by the Omaha World-Herald. Her entry was by far the best submission, and she was declared the winner.

But there was a problem. Some of the editors did not believe that the drawing was original. It was too good, and they thought she had copied it.

To resolve the dilemma, they asked her to come to Omaha and execute a drawing in their presence. She did so, and they were convinced. This girl had talent.

Did she ever. While she was a teenager, she continued her drawing, and her illustrations were published by newspapers in the area. When she turned 19, she headed for New York, portfolio in hand, and soon landed some choice illustration assignments from the likes of Truth, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and Good Housekeeping. In 1894, when she was just 24 years old, she began a cartoon strip for Truth magazine called “The Old Subscriber Calls.” It was the first cartoon strip in America written and drawn by a woman.

Rose was invited to join the staff of Puck in 1896, and from then to 1901, she was the only woman staffer there. In addition to her work with the magazine, she picked up independent commissions and was well-known and much sought after during these years. By 1907, she had been married and divorced twice but was making it quite nicely on her own. She had also published and illustrated a novel, The Loves of Edwy.

Two years later she started what was to become her greatest success and something that would make her the richest illustrator in a world filled with people such as Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, and J.C. Leyendecker. She developed a small cartoon character she called a Kewpie, an ever-so-cute infant character modeled after the attendants of Cupid. The character was a small, rounded figure with a top-knot of hair. O’Neill began drawing cartoons with these characters, first for the Ladies Home Journal in 1909 and later for Good Housekeeping, and Woman’s Home Companion. The cartoons were highly popular.

Three years later, O’Neill teamed up with a German porcelain manufacturer to produce the first Kewpie doll. These were also popular but fragile. Later, they were made from a softer composite material that rendered them less destructible, and they became one of the first toys to be mass-marketed to the American public. That, in turn, made O’Neill fantastically wealthy.

Despite her wealth, O’Neill continued her work as an illustrator, designing and illustrating ads for Jell-O, Eastman Kodak, and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. She bought several homes, including one on Washington Square in New York City. Her beauty, bohemian lifestyle, and flamboyance provided the inspiration for the musical and song “Rose of Washington Square.” She also used her illustration talents to advance the cause of women’s suffrage in New York and elsewhere.

O’Neill also continued to develop as an artist, traveling to Europe and studying sculpture with Auguste Rodin.

Her lavish spending and the Depression depleted O’Neill’s fortune, and she spent her last years in her last remaining home in the Ozarks of Missouri. There she died in 1944.

Middle illustration: The Kewpies comic strip

Bottom illustration: A suffrage poster using the Kewpie characters

Gretchen McCullough on the ‘new way’ of writing

The reason we once found speech easier for imparting emotions isn’t an inherent property of sound waves and voice boxes. Rather, it’s that we’re more used to employing a broad range of styles in face-to-face communication. An expansive palette of possibilities lets us convey nuanced meta-messages like solidarity (by converging toward someone else’s linguistic style at a given moment) and double meaning (by noticing when what someone is saying doesn’t match with how they say it). Source: Opinion | We Learned to Write the Way We Talk – The New York Times

Along the way, she manages to dismiss the standard rules of English usage and those who would teach and enforce them.

A formal, disembodied style does have a place in the pantheon of linguistic genres. But the problem with this tradition is that it’s a jealous god — rather than say, “Here is a style that’s useful sometimes,” it says, “Here is the only correct way to write, and any variation from it is Bad and Wrong.”

I do not share her enthusiasm for this new type of writing, although I see some value in it — occasionally.

The rules of English usage have developed over a long period of time, and they are not to be dismissed as lightly as she seems to want to do. There are many good reasons for these rules, even though some are ossified. Chief among those reasons, to my mind, is the discipline it takes to use them.

Breaking rules is one thing. Knowing that you’re breaking them, and knowing why, is a far different thing.

In any event, if you are interested in the development of the language, you should read this article, but I would warn you not to be so taken in by the author’s enthusiasm that you miss the implications of what she is saying.

Writing: It started with the Sumerians

The earliest writing that is anything close to what we do today comes from the Sumerians, the ancient civilization that occupied the Tigris and Euphrates valley (now Iraq and Iran) more than 3,000 years ago.

Paper and ink, as we know it, were nonexistent then in that part of the world. Instead, the Sumerians made soft clay tablets and used some kind of pointed instrument to impress upon these tablets a set of symbols they had developed to represent the information and ideas they wanted to record. These tablets hardened into permanent records, and we in the twenty-first century have been the lucky inheritors of a few thousand of them – enough to know a little about what the Sumerians were like.

Archeologists have figured out enough about Sumerian writing to translate the first story we have in writing, The Epic of Gilgamesh. The story – the journeys of a legendary hero of the time – has drawn the widest attention to the writing of the Sumerians and is even considered to be in the realm of literature.

But much of the writing of Sumerians has nothing to do with literature. Many of the tablets we possess are simply recordings of the everyday concerns of the Sumerians. They contain information about what was grown and stored, how buildings should be constructed, and a variety of other mundane concerns.

These early writers went to great pains to record this information. Preparing and writing on a clay tablet was undoubtedly much more difficult than firing up a computer or grabbing a pen and a sheet of paper. Yet these ancients wrote with care and precision. They tried to get it right. They tried to get down good information that they could refer to and that others could use.

They did this not because they thought that distant civilizations such as ours would be reading their work 3,000 years after it was produced. Rather, they went to the trouble to write things down because it was important to them at the time, and it was important that they pass on information to their contemporaries and immediate successors. These ancient authors certainly believed that what they were doing was beneficial to them and to their society. They approached the job of writing with a serious purpose in mind.

So should we.

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Why do we know anything about Sumerian writing at all? A lot of the credit goes to a 19th-century English aristocrat named Austen Henry Layard, whose amateur interest in archaeology and Mesopotamia led him to the astounding discovery of Ashurbinopal’s Library in the late 1840s.

More on Layard and the ancient library next week.

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