A child of the Great Depression, cartoonist Jules Feiffer often turned to adventure comic strips and the tales of Hammett and Chandler, along with the films based on their works. He explains that these elaborate fantasy worlds allowed him to escape from and survive the very real difficulties of life at this time in American history. Feiffer’s new graphic novel Kill My Mother (W.W. Norton, August 2014), reaches back to his first obsessions; playing with his past, Kill My Mother launches him into a form of graphic expression he says he was unable to find until the age of 80. Happy in his later years, Feiffer asserts that he can finally return to what he really wanted to do in the first place. Feiffer was a Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor of the American Academy in Berlin in Spring 2014.