Illustrator Albert Dorne was born in the slums of New Yorks Lower East Side. Despite childhood afflictions with tuberculosis, heart trouble, and poverty, his dream was to become an artist. After finishing the seventh grade, Dornes formal education came to a halt, as he needed to find work to support his mother, two sisters, and younger brother. At the age of thirteen, he managed four newsstands in New York; at fourteen, he became an office boy with a movie chain; at fifteen he was a salesman for another movie chain.

At sixteen, Dorne was married and began to worry that the career he had planned in art was slipping away. To get started, he took a job without pay in an artists studio as a general handyman working from nine to five, and...