Barbara Shermund: Overlooked No More

 The New York Times  has a section called Overlooked No More, where from time to time they print stories about men and women who were not mentioned in their obituary section at the time of their death.

One such woman was Barbara Shermund.  Barbara was an artist and cartoonist during most of her life.  She was born in San Francisco in 1899.  She was the daughter of Henry, an architect, and Fredda, a sculptor.  She attended CFSA (California School of Fine Arts), where she studied painting and printmaking.  In her early 20's Shermund went to New York.  She found an apartment in a building that was once the childhood home of Dorothy Parker, who would become Shermund's peer at The New Yorker and in some ways her literary parallel.  She enrolled in drawing classes, before landing a job at The New Yorker.  Shermund found her voice as a cartoonist remarkably fast, and once started, she never looked back.  Her characters were alive and astute, and tapped into the first wave of feminism.  In all, she contributed almost six hundred cartoons, and 12 covers, to The New Yorker.  

The reason she was not recognized at her death was that at that time, New York newspapers were on strike, and no national obituary was published.  She died in 1978, at a nursing home in New Jersey, where she lived the last decades of her life drawing at her kitchen table and swimming in the channel across from her home.