He never graduated from high school, finding his time was better spent honing his skills which he began at The Salt Lake Tribune as a sports illustrator during his late teenage years.

The drawings depicted the flapper era in a way that both satirized and influenced the styles and mores of the time, and his images have continued to define the Jazz Age for subsequent generations.

[1] His father was born in Geneva, Switzerland to Jacques Held, a watchmaker, and was noticed by Mormon educator John R. Park who was scouting Europe for talented young people.

He privately developed his musical abilities on the cornet and organized Held's Band, which performed at all major Utah events for about fifty years.

[4] John Held Jr.'s maternal grandfather, James Evans, was an English convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who traveled to Salt Lake City with the Mormon handcart pioneers.

[5] In 1905, he began working as a sports illustrator and cartoonist at the Salt Lake City Tribune with his fellow West High School classmate Harold Ross.

[6] While living in a flat with Hal Burrows and Mahonri Young, he drew posters for Collier's Street Railway Advertising Company and ads for Wanamaker's Department Store, and designed costumes and sets for the theater to make ends meet.

During this commission, he participated in an expedition co-sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Foundation with archaeologists Sylanus Morley and Herbert Spinden.

By 1927, Held's work had appeared in Life, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, and The New Yorker, and he had also contributed illustrations for other influential magazines, including Judge and The Smart Set.

[6] His work, which quickly became popular, defined the "funny, stylish image of the flapper with her cigarette holder, shingle bob and turned-down hose and of her slick-haired boyfriend in puffy pants and raccoon coat," whom he named Betty Co-ed and Joe College; the perfect archetypes for the generation.

Held's first cover for Fitzgerald was a companion book of short stories for The Beautiful and Damned, and he subsequently illustrated Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) and The Vegetable (1923).

Held Jr slipped occasional imagery alluding to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints such as temples, the acronym ZCMI, the Angel Moroni, and Brigham Young, and though some people believe he sneaked them in, Ross was fully aware of it and actually encouraged it.

[12] Held also created the iconic "Wise Men Fish Here" sign which hung above the door of the Gotham Book Mart for the life of the store.

[2] He moved to a dairy farm in Wall, New Jersey in 1943 working as a free-lance artist and illustrating children's books, after serving with his wife in the area during World War II in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, painting pictures of radar apparatus.

[17][1] His classic style is represented by the exaggeratedly tall and skinny, yet anatomically correct flapper women that made him famous, shown in minimal detail with a high influence of angle and diagonal lines and a comedic use of color.

[18][1] In the midst of his long career, he began to loathe the characters he created, but looking back towards the end of his life, he was amazed by the uproar and social criticism that those women evoked.

[1] Having stated that he wasn't sure whether religion created his interest in geography or vice versa, he was also known for his satirical cartography, which contained cartoons and purposefully unrealistic geographical proportions.

[1] Corey Ford described Held as both the recorder and the setter of popular styles and manners of the Jazz Age:His angular and scantily clad flapper was accepted by scandalized elders as the prototype of modern youth, the symbol of our moral revolution ... Week after week in Life and Judge and College Humor, they danced the Charleston with ropes of beads swinging and bracelets clanking and legs kicking at right angles ...

[6][2] In 1927, Held was nominated for the Vanity Fair Hall of Fame: "Because as a caricaturist, he invented the modern flapper; because last year he was almost elected a member of Congress from Connecticut; because he is a syndicated artist who has not lost his flair for drawing and satire; because he is a born comedian.