Harvey Pekar
Harvey Lawrence Pekar (/ˈpiːkɑːr/; October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010)[1] was an American underground comic book writer, music critic, and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series. In 2003, the series inspired a well-received film adaptation of the same name.
Harvey Pekar
Harvey Lawrence Pekar
October 8, 1939
Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
July 12, 2010 (aged 70)
Cleveland Heights, Ohio, U.S.
- Comic book writer
- filing clerk
- music
- literary critic
Autobiography
1959–2010
- Inkpot Award, 1986
- American Book Award, 1987
- Harvey Award, 1995
- Eisner Award Hall of Fame, 2011
Frequently described as the "poet laureate of Cleveland",[2][3] Pekar "helped change the appreciation for, and perceptions of, the graphic novel, the drawn memoir, the autobiographical comic narrative."[4] Pekar described his work as "autobiography written as it's happening. The theme is about staying alive, getting a job, finding a mate, having a place to live, finding a creative outlet. Life is a war of attrition. You have to stay active on all fronts. It's one thing after another. I've tried to control a chaotic universe. And it's a losing battle. But I can't let go. I've tried, but I can't."[5]
Among the awards given to Pekar for his work were the Inkpot Award, the American Book Award, a Harvey Award, and his posthumous induction into the Eisner Award Hall of Fame.
Life[edit]
Harvey Pekar and his younger brother Allen were born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a Jewish family.[6] Their parents were Saul and Dora Pekar, immigrants from Białystok, Poland. Saul Pekar was a Talmudic scholar who owned a grocery store on Kinsman Avenue, with the family living above the store.[7] Although Pekar said he wasn't close to his parents due to their dissimilar backgrounds and because they worked all the time, he still "marveled at how devoted they were to each other. They had so much love and admiration for one another."[8]
Pekar's first language as a child was Yiddish and he learned to read and appreciate novels in the language.[9]
Pekar said he did not have friends for the first few years of his life.[10] The neighborhood he lived in had once been all white but became mostly black by the 1940s. One of the few white children living there, Pekar was often beaten up. He later believed this instilled in him "a profound sense of inferiority."[11] This experience, however, also taught him to become a "respected street scrapper."[11]
Pekar graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1957. He then briefly served in the United States Navy. After being discharged he attended Case Western Reserve University, where he dropped out after a year.[7] He worked odd jobs before he was hired as file clerk at the Veterans Administration Hospital in 1965.[12] He held this job after becoming famous, refusing all promotions, until he retired in 2001.[7][11]
Pekar was married three times. He was married from 1960 to 1972 to his first wife, Karen Delaney.[13] According to fellow cartoonist R. Crumb, who knew the couple socially, "She left him.... She took all the money out of their bank account and ran off.... Never heard from her again."[14]
His second wife was Helen Lark Hall, who appeared (as "Lark") in a number of early issues of American Splendor.[14] They married in 1977. According to Crumb again (and as dramatized in the American Splendor film), "...she was trying to have a career in academia and Harvey would embarrass her. They'd go to these academic cocktail parties and Harvey would deliberately antagonize these professors. He thought the whole academia thing was bullshit. So he used to embarrass her and she'd become angry at him until finally she gave up on him."[14] They divorced in 1981.
Pekar's third wife, whom he married in 1984, was writer Joyce Brabner[13] who became a regular character in American Splendor.
In 1990, as described by Publishers Weekly, "Pekar was diagnosed with lymphoma and needed chemotherapy. By the time the disease was discovered, the couple was in the midst of buying a house (a tremendous worry to Pekar, who fretted about both the money and corruptions of bourgeois creature comforts)."[15] After Pekar's recovery, he and Brabner collaborated on Our Cancer Year (released in 1994), a graphic novel account of that experience, as well as his harrowing yet successful treatment.
Around this same time, Brabner and Pekar became guardians of a young girl, Danielle Batone, when she was nine years old.[16] Danielle became the couple's foster daughter and eventually became a recurring character in American Splendor as well.[17]
Pekar lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with Brabner and Batone.[16][18]
Career[edit]
Early comics work[edit]
Pekar's friendship with Robert Crumb led to the creation of the self-published, autobiographical comic book series American Splendor. Crumb and Pekar became friends through their shared love of jazz records.[19] It took Pekar a decade to do so: "I theorized for maybe ten years about doing comics."[20] Pekar's influences from the literary world included James Joyce, Arthur Miller, George Ade, Henry Roth, and Daniel Fuchs.[21]
Around 1972, Pekar laid out some stories with crude stick figures and showed them to Crumb and another artist, Robert Armstrong. Impressed, they both offered to illustrate.[22] Pekar & Crumb's one-pager "Crazy Ed" was published as the back cover of Crumb's The People's Comics (Golden Gate Publishing Company, 1972), becoming Pekar's first published work of comics. Including "Crazy Ed" and before the publication of American Splendor #1, Pekar wrote a number of other comic stories that were published in a variety of outlets:
Notable exchange in The Comics Journal between Pekar and critic R. Fiore on such topics as literary realism, Pekar's comics, Art Spiegelman's Maus, the Hernandez brothers, and the underground comix era: