[2][3][4] As a lifelong New Yorker, a large portion of his work interprets the life, culture and political events of New York City.
[5] When a case of double pneumonia confined Sorel to bed for nearly a year, he passed the time learning to draw and it evolved into a career path.
[2] As he explains in Mary Astor's Purple Diary, he took his name from the character Julien Sorel of The Red and the Black by Stendhal, with whom he felt akin because both hated their fathers, the clergy and the corrupt society of their time.
[6] Sorel was a co-founder of Push Pin Studios with Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Reynold Ruffins in 1953.
He then sold the magazine a cartoon satirizing the glamor of the Kennedy family, an early example of his parody movie posters.
[2] In the later 1960s he produced full-color satirical bestiaries for the left-wing journal Ramparts, and a series called "Sorel's Unfamiliar Quotations" for The Atlantic.
Sorel joined The New Yorker in late 1992 contributing a cover to the first issue edited by new editor Tina Brown.
His art has also appeared on the covers of Harper's Magazine, Fortune, Forbes, Esquire, Time, American Heritage, Atlantic Monthly.
Sorel also had a lengthy association with Penthouse, often lavishly reworking earlier drawings and ideas from his work for The Village Voice and The Nation.
In 2001 the Art Directors Club of New York elected him to their Hall of Fame,[5] the first cartoonist since John Held Jr. to be so honored.