Born January 8, 1904 as Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr., Peter Arno was best known for his satirical cartoons of New York cafe society, which appeared for many years in The New Yorker magazine.

He was about to abandon his ambition to be an artist for a musical career when he received a check for a drawing that he submitted to a new humor magazine, The New Yorker, that had debuted February 21, 1925. With the publication of that spot illustration on June 20, 1925, Arno began a 43-year association with editor Harold Ross's weekly magazine. Arno can be credited with having helped develop the publication's tradition of sophisticated humor. Although he may not have invented the single-speaker-captioned cartoon, he surely perfected...