Ed Koren obit

Ed Koren, New Yorker cartoonist and beloved Vermonter, dies at 87

 

He was not on the list.

Edward Koren, who spent more than six decades delighting readers of the New Yorker with his unmistakably shaggy and joyous cartoons, died Friday at his home in Brookfield. He was 87 years old.

Koren’s wife, Curtis, confirmed his death to the New York Times.

Born in New York City in 1935, Koren attended Columbia University and earned an M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute. He taught at Brown University and sold his first cartoon to the New Yorker in 1962. The magazine would go on to publish some 1,100 of his pieces, according to the Times, featuring a universe of humans and animals sharing similarly immense noses and wild hair.

He published many collections over the years — including his latest, “In the Wild,” in 2018 — and contributed to children’s books, a poetry collection and even a cookbook.

Though Koren’s remarkable tenure at the New Yorker made him known throughout the world, he was, perhaps, most beloved at home in Vermont, where he bought a house in 1978 and moved full-time in 1982.

“I became enamored,” he said of his adopted state in a 2018 interview with VTDigger. “I just kind of stayed.”

Despite his curmudgeonly affect, Koren became known in Vermont for his generosity to friends, neighbors and strangers alike. A significant subgenre of his work consisted of pen-and-ink drawings he created to raise money for community organizations and to celebrate the life milestones of the network he and Curtis cultivated.

He was particularly generous to aspiring artists, journalists and local news organizations — often contributing work to Seven Days and VTDigger (Curtis served on the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, which operates VTDigger, for nine years, including as its chair). Just this week, Koren emailed this reporter, along with editors from Seven Days and the New Yorker, to introduce and promote the work of a fellow cartoonist.

Koren’s life in Vermont informed much of his later work. He took notes while out and about, returning to his home-studio in Brookfield to gently satirize the Vermonters he encountered. It was not uncommon to find the name of a local bar or school scribbled in his cartoons.

“I'm an inhabitant of two worlds,” he told journalist David Goodman for VTDigger’s ‘The Vermont Conversation’ last October. “My early work was based on the Upper West Side.” By contrast, he said, “Vermont has always had its own milieu that I've drawn from, and I oftentimes mix and match.”

The state — and the White River Junction-based Center for Cartoon Studies — honored his local ties by naming him Vermont’s second cartoonist laureate in 2014. He responded with a mix of appreciation, embarrassment and humor, telling Vermont Public, “It’s a wonderful idea, and I’m very happy to replace my wool hat with a wreath of laurels.”

Koren had a particularly close connection to Brookfield and its environs, where he was an avid cyclist, cross-country skier and — perhaps most importantly to him — firefighter. He served on the Brookfield Volunteer Fire Department for more than three decades, much of that time as a captain, and would regale friends with stories of the Vermonters he encountered on the job.

Late in life, Koren would bemoan the hollowing out of his own community. When he first moved to Brookfield, he told Seven Days, “There were people living in every house up and down the street.” But by 2018, he said, only 13 of 22 structures in his village were occupied, rendering it “a ghost town.”

In July 2022 — two years after Koren was diagnosed with lung cancer — his Brookfield community honored its neighbor in a gathering outside his home. As Seven Days reported at the time, many came sporting T-shirts featuring Koren’s cartoons, and a convoy of Brookfield fire trucks rumbled by.

In March of that year, Koren appeared at the opening of his final exhibit — a pairing with the photographer Stephen Gorman — at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. The long-planned and long-delayed exhibition, called “Down to the Bone,” featured haunting photographs Gorman made of hungry polar bears pillaging the carcasses of whales in the Arctic. Interspersed with those were uncharacteristically bleak Koren drawings of skeletal — though still, somehow, shaggy — creatures.

It was a dark commentary on the ravages of climate change. Koren, who by then was quite ill, summoned seemingly all of his energy to make the journey to the opening and participate in a Q&A onstage with Gorman and a pair of Peabody curators.

Koren never gave up cartooning, even as his health faded, and the New Yorker continued to publish his art.

“I love my life. I love my work,” he told Goodman last fall. “I would hate to say goodbye to it.”

In addition to Curtis, Koren is survived by his three children, Nathaniel, Sasha and Ben.

Koren also contributed to many other publications, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, GQ, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Fortune, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and The Boston Globe. He collaborated with numerous contemporary humorists and authors, notably George Plimpton and Delia Ephron.

Koren's cartoons, drawings, and prints have been widely exhibited in shows across the United States as well as in France, England, and Czechoslovakia.

Koren also contributed a Pond Village Pesto recipe for Miss Piggy's 1996 cookbook, In the Kitchen with Miss Piggy.