Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, was a cartoonist and humorist of considerable talent. He used his own personal version of the Okefenokee Swamp as a slapstick wonderland and populated it with a wild array of talking, wisecracking, animals. He also drew for comic books, worked in animation for Disney, and served for a time as a political cartoonist.

Walter Crawford Kelly was born in Philadelphia. He moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1915, along with, as he put it, "father, mother, sister and sixteen teeth, all his own." The desire to be an artist occurred to him in childhood, and while he was in high school he drew not only for the school paper and yearbook, but also for the local newspaper. One of the things he drew for the paper was a...