Elmer S.Campbell
Elmer Campbell was born on this date in 1906. He was a Black cartoonist.
Elmer Simms Campbell was born in St. Louis. While still in high school, he won a nationwide cartooning contest. He later studied at the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. He then worked as a Red Cap railroad dining-car waiter, amusing himself by drawing caricatures of the passengers. One of them was so impressed with his work that he gave him a job in a commercial art studio in St. Louis.
Campbell later moved to New York City, where he worked for an advertising agency while gradually becoming a regular contributor to various humor magazines.
In 1933, Esquire (the magazine) was established, and Campbell became its foremost cartoonist, with as many as a dozen drawings in an issue. His work was also published in Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, and Playboy. He is best known for his representations of voluptuous women, frequently in a harem setting.
The first Black to publish his work in general-circulation magazines, Elmer Campbell died on Jan. 27, 1971, in White Plains, New York.
The Encyclopedia of African American Heritage
by Susan Altman
Copyright 1997, Facts on File, Inc. New York
ISBN 0-8160-3289-0
