A Sentimental Education from Nursery School through Twelfth Grade

Roz Chast

Roz Chast (b. 1954) grew up in Brooklyn, the child of two schoolteachers, and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied graphic design and painting. After she graduated, as she says on her Web site, she “reverted to type and began drawing cartoons once again.” More than a thousand of her cartoons have been published in the New Yorker magazine since 1978. A collection of twenty-five years of her work was published in Theories of Everything (2006). She collaborated with comedian and novelist Steve Martin on the children’s book The Alphabet from A to Y with a Bonus Letter Z! (2007); she has also written the children’s book Too Busy Marco (2010) and a collection of cartoons entitled What I Hate: From A–Z (2011). She has won numerous awards and received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute and the Art Institute of Boston. Chast is known for her wry commentaries on the experiences of ordinary life such as going to school, which the following cartoon depicts. She has written of her own experience: “I doodled all the time in school—that is what kept me from going completely out of my head.”