Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Pat Oliphant dies at 89

Pat Oliphant died, closing the career of a cartoonist who was described in 1990 as “the most influential political cartoonist now working.” His drawings once ran in more than 500 newspapers and magazines worldwide, giving newspaper readers a shared visual language for presidential power, war and scandal at a time when editorial cartooning still sat near the center of political conversation.

Born Patrick Bruce Oliphant on July 24, 1935, in Adelaide, South Australia, he started as a copyboy in 1952 and became an editorial cartoonist three years later. He moved to the United States in 1964, worked for The Denver Post and later The Washington Star, then built a freelance syndication career that carried his caricatures far beyond one newsroom. In 1967, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning at The Denver Post for “They Won’t Get Us To The Conference Table...Will They?”, published on February 1, 1966.

Oliphant’s style was instantly recognizable for its hard line, bitter humor and relentless eye for power. He became known for skewering presidents and other public figures, from Lyndon B. Johnson through Donald Trump, while his trademark penguin, Punk, often stood at the edge of the frame and commented from the margins. Over the course of his career, the National Cartoonists Society honored him repeatedly, including with the Editorial Cartoon Award, the Reuben Award and the Thomas Nast Prize. The Australian Cartoonists Association said he won the Editorial Cartoon Award seven times, the Reuben Award twice and the Thomas Nast Prize in 1992.

A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant chronicled his career across ten U.S. presidents and featured interviews with Oliphant, his family, friends and colleagues. The documentary helped renew attention to how much influence one cartoonist could wield when newspapers still treated the editorial page as a national stage.

Oliphant retired in 2015 after losing his eyesight around that time. By then, the reach that once carried his work from Denver to Washington and into hundreds of papers had become rare in American journalism, leaving his death as a reminder of how much political life has lost as editorial cartoons have receded from daily prominence.