William Hamilton Cartoonist

They cited one cartoon — a husband and wife dressing in black tie to go out — with the caption, “If we don’t go do you think people will think we weren’t invited?”

“He took a rarefied world and broke it down into terms that would seem familiar to any socially insecure high school student anywhere,” they wrote.

Mr. Hamilton began drawing when he was a child, and his first rejection came from The Saturday Evening Post when he was 12, The New York Sun reported in 2005. He had submitted a cartoon of burglars complaining about the rain as they broke into a house.

In a 1988 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Hamilton said his fascination with those in high society came from “being near money, but far enough away that I couldn’t quite get my fingers around it.”

Mr. Hamilton, who was raised on a ranch in California’s Napa Valley called Ethelwild, said, “We lived on one of those dwindling trust funds with a hint of money in the past, but not much in the present.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/arts/artsspecial/william-hamilton-popular-cartoonist-at-the-new-yorker-dies-in-car-crash.html