[1] He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for editorial cartooning, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.

The Library of Congress has recognized his "remarkable legacy", from 1946 to the present, as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, and art instructor.

In 1956, he became a staff cartoonist at The Village Voice, where he produced the weekly comic strip titled Feiffer until 1997.

In 1965, he wrote The Great Comic Book Heroes, the first history of the comic-book superheroes of the late 1930s and early 1940s and a tribute to their creators.

[7] He won a John Wanamaker Art Contest medal for a crayon drawing of the radio Western hero Tom Mix.

While they, in those pre-super days, were eating up "Cosmo, Master of Disguise"; "Speed Saunders"; and "Bart Regan Spy", I was counting up how many panels there were to a page, how many pages there were to a story – learning how to form, for my own use, phrases like: @X#?/; marking for future reference which comic book hero was swiped from which radio hero: Buck Marshall from Tom Mix; the Crimson Avenger from The Green Hornet ...[8]Feiffer said that cartoons were his first interest when young, "what I loved the most.

"[9] He stated that because he couldn't write well enough to be a writer, or draw well enough to be an artist, he realized that the best way to succeed would be to combine his limited talents in each of those fields to create something unique.

[10] He began to decipher features of different cartoonists, such as the sentimental naturalism of Abbie an' Slats, the [Preston] Sturges-like characters and plots of others, with cadenced dialogue.

After Feiffer graduated from high school at 16, he was desperate for a job, and went unannounced to the office of one of his favorite cartoonists, Will Eisner.

[7] As Eisner recalled in 1978: He began working as just a studio man – he would do erasing, cleanup ... Gradually it became very clear that he could write better than he could draw and preferred it, indeed – so he wound up doing balloons [i.e., dialog].

[12] Over time, Eisner valued Feiffer's opinions and judgments more often, appreciating his "uncanny knack" for capturing the way people talked, without using contrived dialogue.

In 1956, after again first proving his talent by working for free, he became a staff cartoonist at The Village Voice where he produced a weekly comic strip.

[14] After first becoming aware of Feiffer's work, Kubrick wrote him in 1958: The comic themes you weave are very close to my heart ...

I must express unqualified admiration for the scenic structure of your "strips" and the eminently speakable and funny dialog ...

[15]By April 1959, Feiffer was distributed nationally by the Hall Syndicate, initially in The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger and Long Island Press.

He was commissioned in 1997 by The New York Times to create its first op-ed page comic strip, which ran monthly until 2000.

[18] Feiffer's cartoons were typically mini-satires, where he portrayed ordinary people's thoughts about subjects such as sex, marriage, violence and politics.

In a series of a dozen or so pictures, he would show the shifts of mood that flickered across the faces of men and women as they tried, often vainly, to explain themselves to the world, to their husbands and wives, to their mistresses and lovers, to their employers, to their rulers, or simply to the unseen adversaries at the other end of the telephone wires ...

As the Lenny Bruce-ish language suggests, the earliest strips are very much of their time, the postwar Age of Anxiety in the big city; you can practically smell the espresso, the unfiltered ciggies, the lanolin whiff of woolly jumpers.

[19]Feiffer has written two novels (1963's Harry the Rat with Women, 1977's Ackroyd) and several children's books, including Bark, George; Henry, The Dog with No Tail; A Room with a Zoo; The Daddy Mountain; and A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears.

He partnered with The Walt Disney Company and writer Andrew Lippa to adapt his book The Man in the Ceiling into a musical.

I think the most interesting story is how men and women get on with each other, the terms they accept to live together and survive together, the compromises they make, the betrayals of themselves and of each other, and how, despite the fact that over and over again they find that it can't possibly work, it still seems to be preferable to anything else they know about.

Feiffer also wrote and drew one of the earliest graphic novels, the hardcover Tantrum (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979),[21] described on its dustjacket as a "novel-in-pictures".

His autobiography, Backing into Forward: A Memoir (Doubleday, 2010), received positive reviews from The New York Times[22] and Publishers Weekly, which wrote: His account of hitchhiking cross-country invades Kerouac territory, while his ink-stained memories of the comics industry rival Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize–winning fictional portrait.

Such satirical social and political commentary became the turning point in his lust for fame, which finally happened, after many rejections, when acclaim for his anxiety-ridden Village Voice strips served as a springboard into other projects.

The musical was produced and directed by Jeffrey Seller in 2017 at the Bay Street Theatre in neighboring Sag Harbor, New York.

In June–August 2009, Feiffer was in residence as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he taught an undergraduate course on graphic humor in the 20th century.

[32] His third marriage took place in September 2016, when he married freelance writer JZ Holden; the ceremony combined Jewish and Buddhist traditions.