William steig's muse has always been the wolf at the door. As a young man growing up in the Bronx, N.Y., his dream of running away to sea and beachcombing in Hawaii was rudely interrupted by the Depression, when Steig suddenly found himself saddled with supporting his parents and younger brother. "My father was a house painter, and he lost his work," the 87-year-old artist recalled last week in the rambling, light-drenched Boston apartment he shares with his wife, the sculptor and writer Jeanne Steig. "My father said, 'I'm afraid it's up to you, Bill.' So I did the only thing I could: I'd done some drawing for my high-school paper and I'd been to art school, so I went out and peddled drawings." In his first year as a cartoonist, the 23-year-old artist made $4,000, "and the four of us lived splendidly." There was even a sale to The New Yorker, then as now the premier market for comic art. Artistically, he was launched, but it was his sense of responsibility that kept him bent over the drawing board. As he once put it, "I flew out of the nest with my parents on my back."
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