"Tell them I'm finger painting," said veteran Newspaper Cartoonist Edmund Duffy when someone recently tried to invade his comfortable retirement at the end of a long and lustrous career. In 1948, after 24 award-studded years (three Pulitzer Prizes) with the Baltimore Sun, Duffy left to try a hand at magazine cartooning for the Saturday Evening Post, drifted briefly back to newspapers—New York City's transitory Star and the Long
Island Newsday—before vanishing from public view into an apartment on Manhattan's upper East Side. This week, having dangled an irresistible bait, the Washington Post and Times Herald announced that it had lured Cartoonist Duffy,...