Burne Hogarth - Early Life

Early Life

Burne Hogarth was born in Chicago in 1911, the son of a housewife and a carpenter. His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. He displayed an early talent for drawing. His father saved these efforts and, some years later, presented them and the young Hogarth to the registrar at the Art Institute of Chicago. At age 12, Hogarth was accepted and thus began a long formal education that took him through such institutions as Crane College and Northwestern University in Chicago to Columbia University in New York City, all the while studying arts and sciences.

Due to his father’s premature death, Hogarth began working at age 15, when he became the assistant at the Associated Editors Syndicate and illustrated a series called Famous Churches of the World. He worked for several years as an editor and advertising artist. This work provided steady and, by 1929, crucial employment. In 1929, he drew his first comic strip, Ivy Hemmanhaw, for the Barnet Brown Company, and the following year, he drew Odd Occupations and Strange Accidents for Ledd Features Syndicate.

As the Depression worsened, Hogarth relocated to New York at the urging of friends. He found employment with King Features Syndicate in 1934, drawing Charles Driscoll’s pirate adventure Pieces of Eight (1935). In 1936 came the assignment that catapulted Hogarth’s illustration career. With Tarzan, Hogarth brought together classicism, expressionism and narrative into a new form of dynamic sequential art. He drew the Tarzan Sunday page for 12 years (1937–45 and 1947–50). This work has been reprinted often, most recently by NBM Publishing.