Rube Goldberg, dean of American cartoonists, was born Reuben Lucius Goldberg on July 4, 1883, in San Francisco. He began drawing at an early age, and wanted to become a cartoonist, but at his father's insistence, he studied engineering at the University of California. After graduation in 1904, he worked as an assistant in the city engineer's office, San Francisco. He quit the job in six months, however, and worked first on the San Francisco Chronicleand then the Bulletin as a sports cartoonist. In 1907 he went to New York and became sports illustrator for the Evening Mail,gradually working into wholly humorous cartoons. During the fourteen years he was with the Mail he created the comic features which brought him national fame -Boob McNutt, Foolish Questions, Mike and Ike, Life's Little Jokes, and the zany inventions which made him the wizard of gadgetry. He left the paper in 1921 and syndicated his cartoons. At the same time he tried his hand at composing songs, writing stories and articles, which appeared in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Redbook,Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair and Collier's. In 1938 he became editorial cartoonist for the New York Sun and in 1948 was awarded the Pulitzer prize for his cartoon, "Peace Today," which showed a blissful American family seated on top of an atomic bomb, which teetered between world control and world destruction.
Humorist and author, as well as cartoonist, he has written a number of books, including Is There a Doctor in the House (1929), Rube Goldberg's Guide to Europe (1954), How to Remove the Cotton from a Bottle of Aspirin (1959), and I Made My Bed, by Kathy O'Farrell, as told to Rube Goldberg (1960), a spoof on the personal confession type of autobiography.
Mr. Goldberg gave his papers to the Bancroft Library in 1964. They include some correspondence (mainly letters from famous people, fan mail and crank letters); over 5000 original drawings for comic strips and editorial cartoons, covering the period 1907-1960; clippings; scrapbooks; manuscripts of articles, stories and songs; books written by him; photographs, records and film. The collection is described in greater detail in the Key to Arrangement which follows. Mr. Goldberg did not systematically save letters, and so the correspondence represents only what escaped destruction and loss. The drawings, also, constitute only a part of his great output over the years, since Mr. Goldberg generously gave away so many of his sketches. The original of the Pulitzer prize cartoon is at the School of Journalism at Columbia University.
Most of the photographs have been removed from the collection and catalogued seperately.