Charles Addams

Charles Samuel Addams, born January 7, 1912, in Westfield, New Jersey, and dying September 29, 1988, was an American cartoonist whose work featured dark humor and macabre characters. His recurring figures eventually became known as the Addams Family, later popularized in various adaptations.

Growing up in Westfield, Addams was the son of Grace M. Spear and Charles Huey Addams, a piano company executive who had trained as an architect. Childhood friends remembered him as something of a neighborhood rascal. Despite the different spelling of their last names, he was a distant relative of U.S. presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and a first cousin twice removed from social reformer Jane Addams. As a child, he enjoyed visiting the Presbyterian Cemetery on Mountain Avenue, where, according to Addams expert Ron MacCloskey, he would ponder what it felt like to be dead. His later cartoons placed his ghoulish creations on Cemetery Ridge with a dreadful view. Two houses—one on Elm Street and another on Dudley Avenue, where police once caught him breaking in—are thought to have inspired the Addams Family mansion. College Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, where Addams studied, also served as inspiration. One friend noted that his sense of humor was a bit different from everyone else’s. A biographer described him as drawing with a happy vengeance. His father encouraged his artistic pursuits, and Addams contributed cartoons to the Westfield High School yearbook, *Weathervane*. He attended Colgate University in 1929 and 1930, then the University of Pennsylvania in 1930 and 1931, and finally studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City from 1931 to 1932. Another house at 52 Maple Avenue in Hamilton is also tied to myths about the Addams Family home.

In 1933, Addams joined the layout department of *True Detective* magazine, retouching photos of corpses to remove blood for publication. He complained that many of those corpses were more interesting as they were. His first drawing for *The New Yorker* appeared in the February 4, 1933, issue (not February 1932, as a 1988 obituary stated). On August 6, 1938, he published the first cartoon in the series that became *The Addams Family*, which ran regularly until his death. He remained a freelancer throughout his career. During World War II, he served at the Signal Corps Photographic Center in New York, creating animated training films for the U.S. Army. In 1952, he painted a mural for a Hamptons hotel bar, now housed in the Penn State library, featuring prominent Addams Family members. Television producer David Levy approached Addams to create *The Addams Family* TV series, and Addams provided names and character traits for the actors; the show aired on ABC from 1964 to 1966.

Addams’s cartoons appeared regularly in *The New Yorker*, and he also produced the syndicated single-panel comic *Out of This World* from 1955 to 1957. His work was collected in books like *Drawn and Quartered* (1942) and *Monster Rally* (1950), the latter with a foreword by John O’Hara. One cartoon shows two men in a patent attorney’s office, one pointing a bizarre gun out the window and saying, “Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why, it doesn’t even slow them up!” *Dear Dead Days* (1959) is a scrapbook of vintage images and text that appealed to his grotesque sensibilities, including Victorian woodcuts, medicine-show ads, and a boyhood photo of three-legged Francesco Lentini. Over his lifetime, Addams drew more than 1,300 cartoons, which also appeared in *Collier’s*, *TV Guide*, books, calendars, and merchandise. The 1957 album *Ghost Ballads*, featuring folk songs about the supernatural by Dean Gitter, used Addams’s cover art of a haunted house. The Mystery Writers of America gave him a Special Edgar Award in 1961. The films *The Old Dark House* (1963) and *Murder by Death* (1976) used title sequences illustrated by Addams. In 1946, after illustrating Ray Bradbury’s short story “Homecoming” for *Mademoiselle*—the first in a series about a family of Illinois vampires called the Elliotts—Addams met Bradbury. They became friends and planned a book on the Elliott family’s complete history, with Bradbury writing and Addams illustrating, but the project never happened. Bradbury’s Elliott stories were finally collected in *From the Dust Returned* (2001), with a connecting narrative and an explanation of his work with Addams; Addams’s 1946 illustration served as the book’s cover. In a 2001 interview, Bradbury said Addams went his own way to create the Addams Family, while he created his own family in the book. Janet Maslin, reviewing an Addams biography for *The New York Times*, noted that Addams’s persona seemed partly a character for the public eye, pointing to a publicity photo of him in a suit of armor at home, with shelves behind him holding books on painting, antiques, and a John Updike novel.