Since she sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1978, Roz Chast has established herself as one of our greatest artistic chroniclers of the anxieties, superstitions, furies, insecurities, and surreal imaginings of modern life.
Since then, nine collections have been published of Chast’s work, most recently, Theories of Everything, a twenty-five year retrospective. Roz is known for her cast of recurring characters – generally hapless but relatively cheerful “everyfolk.” In her cartoons, she addresses the universal topics of guilt, anxiety, aging, families, friends, money, real estate, and as she would say, “much, much more!” The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has called her “the magazine’s only certifiable genius.”
Chast grew up in Brooklyn. She received a BFA in 1977 from the Rhode Island School of Design with studies in graphic design and painting, but returned to the cartooning which she had begun in high school. Less than two years out of college, she was added to the forty or so artists under contract to The New Yorker which has continually published her work for 33 years, from black and white cartoons to color spreads, back pages and covers.