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Charles Samuel Addams (January 7, 1912 – September 29, 1988) was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. He signed his cartoons Chas Addams. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as the Addams Family, have been the basis for spin-offs in several other forms of media.
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Biography
Life
Addams was born in Westfield, New Jersey, The son of Grace M. (Spear) (1879–1960) and Charles Huey Addams (1882–1963), a piano-company executive who had studied to be an architect, he was known as "something of a rascal around the neighborhood" as childhood friends recalled. Addams was distantly related to U.S. presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, despite the different spellings of their last names, and was a first cousin twice removed to noted social reformer Jane Addams.
A house on Elm Street, and another on Dudley Avenue into which police once caught him breaking and entering, are said to be the inspiration for the Addams Family mansion in his cartoons. College Hall, the oldest building on the current campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where Addams studied, was also an inspiration for the mansion. He was fond of visiting the Presbyterian Cemetery on Mountain Avenue. One friend said of him: "His sense of humor was a little different from everybody else's." He was also artistically inclined, "drawing with a happy vengeance," according to a biographer.
His father encouraged him to draw, and Addams did cartoons for the Westfield High School student literary magazine, Weathervane. He attended Colgate University in 1929 and 1930. At the corners of West Kendrick and Maple Avenues in Hamilton, NY, is another home, and myth, that may have inspired the Addams Family house. He also attended the University of Pennsylvania, where a fine-arts building on campus is named for him, in 1930 and 1931. In front of the building is a sculpture of the silhouettes of Addams Family characters, and the library at Penn State contains a mural which he created in 1952 and depicts prominent Addams Family members. He then studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City in 1931 and 1932.
In 1933, Charles Addams joined the layout department of True Detective magazine, where he had to retouch photos of corpses that appeared in the magazine's stories to remove the blood from them. Addams complained: "A lot of those corpses were more interesting the way they were."
