Don Wright, an editorial cartoonist who turned his gimlet eye and piercing pen on society in work that appeared in newspapers across the United States and was twice honored with the Pulitzer Prize, died March 24 at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 90.
The cause was complications from surgeries, said his wife, Carolyn Jay Wright.
Mr. Wright began his career in 1952 as a copy boy at the now-defunct Miami News and distinguished himself as a photographer before drawing his first cartoons for the newspaper’s editorial page in 1963.
He had no formal training in draftsmanship, but he had found his calling in life and spent much of the next half-century at the drawing table. He became a favorite of readers who looked to cartoons for commentary that was intelligent yet unlarded by “the ponderous, elitist, overwritten poopery” — as he once put it — “that typifies so many editorial pages.”
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In 1966, at age 32, Mr. Wright received his first Pulitzer for a cartoon that encapsulated in a single frame the absurdity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.
In a forsaken terrain pockmarked by bombs, two beleaguered men stand before one another, perhaps the only survivors of the human species. The caption conveys their incredulous question: “You Mean You Were Bluffing?”
Mr. Wright collected another Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, in 1980. After the Miami News folded eight years later, he joined the Palm Beach Post, another Florida newspaper then owned by the Cox chain. He stayed at the Post until he accepted a buyout in 2008. By that point, Mr. Wright had drawn more than 11,000 cartoons.
Syndicated by Tribune Media Services, his work remained a regular presence in the lives of hundreds of thousands of readers until he retired roughly a decade ago.
“Besides being a great, beautiful artist and a hard-hitting cartoonist, he was also clever,” Mike Luckovich, an editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and fellow two-time Pulitzer recipient, said in an interview. “When you have the ability to be hard-hitting and make a point but do it in a clever way, that I really think is the epitome of editorial cartooning — and he was at the top of what we do.”
Mr. Wright brought stark minimalism to a cartoon he drew when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) was fatally shot during his primary bid for the White House in June 1968, a spasm of violence that followed the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. two months earlier and President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
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The panel depicted a single upright bullet, its looming shadow the only interruption in the surrounding white space. “As American As Apple Pie,” the caption read.
Other times, Mr. Wright revealed himself to be a wordsmith as well as a draftsman. In one of his many commentaries on environmental degradation, he depicted Uncle Sam traversing a spoiled landscape, explaining to a young boy how the land had ended up in such a state:
“Well, our spacious skies got dirty when we cut back on clean air standards and we sold the amber waves of grain to other countries. The purple mountain majesties were gutted for strip mining and the fruited plain was leased to Exxon, not to mention the oil derricks offshore from sea to shining sea …”
Politicians were among the chief targets of Mr. Wright’s unsparing wit. During the Watergate scandal, he drew a Martian in uproarious laughter upon learning that Earthlings’ leader is President Richard M. Nixon.
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When Republicans began entering the race for the 1980 presidential nomination, Mr. Wright showed a crew of candidates tossing their hats into a ring while former California governor Ronald Reagan — who went on to become at age 69 the oldest person, up to that point, to assume the presidency — threw in a cane.
And although constitutionally a liberal, Mr. Wright considered President Bill Clinton, a Democrat whose time in the White House was clouded by a sex scandal, a gift to cartoonists. “I have to tell you, I really miss him,” Mr. Wright remarked to an interviewer after Clinton left office.
Mr. Wright’s most enduring cartoon was one that skewered no one. It was a pictographic eulogy for Walt Disney, the animator and filmmaker, upon his death in 1966 at age 65. The cartoon showed Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and a retinue of Disney characters weeping, their whimsy subsumed by grief.
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“I’m sometimes baffled,” Mr. Wright told the Palm Beach Post in 2008, “by the number of readers who believe that cartoons should be lightweight and entertainingly ‘funny.’ Humor has a lot of relatives — wry, subtle, slapstick and even black — all aimed at the endless Iraq War, inept and corrupt politicians, rising unemployment, recession, Americans losing their homes, and on and on.
“But, think about it for a moment,” he continued. “How funny are those?”
Don Conway Wright, one of three sons, was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 23, 1934. His father was a maintenance supervisor for Eastern Air Lines, and his mother was a homemaker. The family moved to Florida when Mr. Wright was a boy, first living in Jacksonville and then moving south to Miami.
He joined the Miami News upon his high school graduation. Even at that early date, he harbored hopes of becoming a cartoonist but was attracted to the challenges and thrills of photography.
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At least for a time, “all of these fantasies about becoming a great strip cartoonist just went away,” he told an interviewer. “I began to understand what life was all about because I was forced into situations I had never dreamed of, covering bookie raids, seeing mutilated bodies and just shocking things that I came in contact with at an age that I think most people … would never have had to confront.”
He paused his newspaper career for a stint as an Army photographer, then returned to the Miami News, were he oversaw the photo department and layout operations as graphics editor before beginning his cartooning in earnest.
In addition to his two Pulitzer wins, Mr. Wright was a five-time finalist for the award. His cartoons were collected in books including “Wright On! A Collection of Political Cartoons” (1971) and “Wright Side Up” (1981).
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Mr. Wright’s first wife, the former Rita Blondin, died in 1968 after seven years of marriage. He and Carolyn Jay met at the Miami News, where she was a reporter on the city desk, and married in 1969. Besides his wife, of West Palm Beach, survivors include a brother.
Mr. Wright did not fit the stereotype of the slovenly newsman. He wore a tie to work. He was what a colleague once described as an “irascible perfectionist,” toiling over his cartoons late into the night and into the early hours of the morning, sometimes heading home as the sun rose, a reporter for the Palm Beach Post noted in an obituary.
“I think the insatiable curiosity that newspapermen have — the childish enthusiasm for everything going on around them — is what sustains me,” he once reflected, “and I know it’s what sustains most newspaper people.”
