Roz Chast
Roz Chast has spent decades mining the craziness of her life and her imagination as one of the most popular staff cartoonists of the New Yorker. Chast earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977, but chafed against the school’s highbrow aesthetic and scorn for cartoons. She moved to New York and began creating comics for Christopher Street and the Village Voice before selling her first cartoon to the New Yorker in 1978. Chast’s work owes much to both New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams’s unconventional Addams Family and to underground comix pioneers like Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Lynda Barry, with her shaky line drawings and her focus on neurotic families and the minutia of everyday life. Besides the New Yorker, her work has appeared in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review. She has written or illustrated over a dozen books, including two collections of her New Yorker cartoons, The Party After You Left in 2004 and Theories of Everything in 2006. In 2014 she was a National Book Award finalist for her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? about her parents’ decline and deaths.
How to cite this page
Jewish Women's Archive. "Roz Chast." (Viewed on January 26, 2021) <https://jwa.org/people/chast-roz>.