Charles Whitfield Richards Biography:

Southern artist and journalist Charles Whitfield Richards was born in 1906 in Rome, Mississippi. Richards started his career at the age of fifteen as a reporter for the Memphis Press (the editor thought he was much older). During 1924-25, he traveled with a circus and worked as a merchant marine.

In 1927 Richards arrived in New Orleans and took a reporting job on the New Orleans Item. Though New Orleans was his home base, he traveled widely. Over the following decades, he reported for newspapers of other southern and eastern cities as well, including Houston, Memphis, Jacksonville, Kansas City, San Antonio, and New York. Richards often illustrated his own newspaper stories with imagi...