Held, John, Jr.

John Held, Jr., (born Jan. 10, 1889, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.—died March 2, 1958, Belmar, N.J.), cartoonist whose work epitomized the “jazz age” of the 1920s in the United States.

At the age of 16 he was drawing sports and political cartoons for the Salt Lake Tribune, and at 19 he sold his first cartoon to a national magazine. Shortly afterward he went to New York City, where he worked in the art department of a newspaper.

After service in the U.S. Navy during World War I, Held returned to New York City, where he gained fame and wealth for his drawings in the popular humour magazines Life, Judge, and College Humor. These drawings conveyed a spirit of the era comparable to that in the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In particular, Held created such immortal characters as the short-skirted, short-haired “flapper,” who rolled her stockings and used a long cigarette holder, and her escort, who wore a raccoon coat, had patent-leather hair parted in the middle, smoked a pipe, and carried a hip flask. Held’s ability to point up the foibles of the time without sentimentality or bitterness made his cartoons notable. Also during the 1920s, he drew two comic strips: “Merely Margie, an Awfully Sweet Girl” and “Rah, Rah, Rosalie,” both of which ended with the Depression.

During the 1930s Held wrote novels and short stories and did sculpture and woodcuts. His woodcuts, often evoking the “Gay Nineties,” appeared in The New Yorker magazine. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and was stationed in Belmar, N.J., where he made his home after the war. Held’s Angels (1952), illustrated by Held, with text by Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr., was a word and picture evocation of the 1920s.