Jon Agee

I grew up in Nyack, New York, just up the street from the Hudson River. In our house, there was always an art project going on.

My early drawings were very animated: a lot of stuff zipping around, airplanes, racing cars, football players. No surprise my first published drawing was a pack of rats running along a highway (The Rat Race). I did that for the New York Times Op Ed page when I was still in high school.

I went to college at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. I studied painting, sculpture, and filmmaking, but what I loved doing most—in my spare time—was drawing cartoons and comic strips.

When I graduated, I hauled my pile of doodles into the offices of a bunch of editors, with the wild notion that somebody might publish them. When that failed, I wrote a story for kids to go with my pictures (If Snow Falls). It was two sentences long (which counts, by the way). Frances Foster, a wonderful editor at Random House, saw something in that book and signed me up.

The next book, Ellsworth, was about a dog who teaches economics at a university. When he gets home, he throws off his clothes and acts like a dog, which is fine, until some fellow teachers discover this, and he loses his job. Somebody told me that Ellsworth was a story about “being yourself.” I never realized it had a moral.

Books in order of publication:

IF SNOW FALLS – 1982

ELLSWORTH – 1983

LUDLOW LAUGHS – 1985

THE INCREDIBLE PAINTING OF FELIX CLOUSSEAU – 1988

GO HANG A SALAMI! I’M A LASAGNA HOG! And Other Palindromes – 1991

THE RETURN OF FREDDY LEGRAND – 1992

FLAPSTICK – 1993

SO MANY DYNAMOS! And Other Palindromes – 1994

DMITRI THE ASTRONAUT – 1995

WHO ORDERED THE JUMBO SHRIMP? And Other Oxymorons – 1998

SIT ON A POTATO PAN, OTIS! More Palindromes – 1999

ELVIS LIVES! And Other Anagrams – 2000

PALINDROMANIA! – 2002

Z GOES HOME – 2003

TERRIFIC – 2005

SMART FELLER FART SMELLER And Other Spoonerisms – 2006

NOTHING – 2007

THE RETIRED KID – 2008

ORANGUTAN TONGS Poems to Tangle Your Tongue – 2009

MR. PUTNEY’S QUACKING DOG – 2010

MY RHINOCEROS – 2011

THE OTHER SIDE OF TOWN – 2012

LITTLE SANTA – 2013

IT’S ONLY STANLEY – 2015

LION LESSONS – 2016

LIFE ON MARS – 2017

THE WALL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BOOK – 2018

I WANT A DOG – 2019

OTTO A Palindrama – 2021