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William Allen Rogers (1854–1931) was an American political cartoonist born in Springfield, Ohio.[1]
Biography
He studied at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Wittenberg College, but never graduated. Rogers taught himself to draw[2] and began submitting political cartoons to Midwestern newspapers in his teens.[1] At the age of fourteen, his first cartoons appeared in a Dayton, Ohio-based newspaper, to which Rogers' mother had earlier submitted a selection of his sketches.[2]
The start of Rogers' career as an illustrator came in 1873 when he was hired by the Daily Graphic in New York.[2][3] He was nineteen years old at the time.[2] Rogers' job at the Daily Graphic was to help out with the news sketches and at times draw cartoons.[2]
In 1877, he was hired by Harper's Weekly to draw the magazine's political cartoons after the departure of Thomas Nast.[2][4] The cartoons were dramatic adjuncts that illustrated the magazine's editorials.[5] Walt Reed, author of The Illustrator in America: 1860-2000, writes that while Rogers cartoons "never quite approached Nast's in power, his ideas were strongly presented and his drawings somewhat more skillful."[4] Rogers remained at Harper's Weekly for twenty-five years,[2] and lived in St. George, Staten Island.[6]
After leaving Harper's Weekly, Rogers was hired by the New York Herald, where he drew cartoons daily for a total of twenty years. He occasionally worked for Life too, and submitted cartoons and illustrations for Puck, The Century Magazine, and St. Nicholas Magazine.[2]
Rogers retired as a cartoonist in 1926 while working for the Washington Post.[2] He died in Washington, D.C., in 1931.[1]
Gallery
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World War I United States Navy recruitment poster using one of Rogers's cartoons for the New York Herald. -
George Bartle, who was the seal caretaker from 1852–99, for the March 1878 Harper’s Magazine -
"Return of the Great White Fleet". The cartoon appeared in the New York Herald on February 22, 1909 -
1904 cartoon recreates the Big Stick Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt as an episode in Gulliver's Travels
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