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Endpoint: Jack Kent (Cartoonist & Author)

created on: 12/11/2024
by: bob (9559)

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Jack Kent (born John Wellington Zurawski on 10 March 1920 in Burlington, Iowa - died 18 October, 1985, USA (aged 65)) was an American cartoonist and children's book author.
At the age of fifteen, he dropped out of high school to pursue a career in commercial art. His first major client—as a teenager—was Collier’s.
A matter of days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Jack enlisted in the US Army.
At the age of thirty-one, Jack had achieved his professional dream. He was a nationally syndicated cartoonist.
In March 1953, as his marriage to Juliet was ending, Jack’s first book—a collection of King Aroo strips—was published. He is perhaps best known for this “King Aroo” comic strips, which ran in various degrees of syndication from 1950 to 1965.

In the 1950s, Kent married Juliet Bridgman; he divorced her eight months later; and then he married June Kilstofte. Kent met Kilstofte when she interviewed him for a magazine. The Kents eventually built a home on the San Antonio River.

Kent contributed art to MAD Magazine, Playboy, Humpty Dumpty, The Saturday Evening Post and others. However, beginning in 1968 (at the age of forty-eight), Kent turned his attention to children’s books.

In the early 1970s, Jack was firmly on the path to a sustainable career in children’s books, a career that would result in over 60 published works, among them such classics as The Fat Cat and There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon, published by Golden Press in 1977.

One of Jack’s dying wishes had been that his manuscripts and artwork go to the Kerlan Collection, a children’s literature archive housed at the University of Minnesota. The collection’s curator at the time, Karen Nelson Hoyle, had visited Jack and June a few years earlier to tell them about the Kerlan, which would preserve the work and provide access to it for scholars.
His biography "Jack Kent: The Wit, Whimsy, and Wisdom of a Comic Storyteller" was written by Paul V. Allen and published in print 31 July 2023.

Kent passed from Leukemia in 1985 at the age of 65.