Novel Dickinsonia

Peter Steiner occasionally reverts to his former professorial role, here talking with alumni about his novel, A French Country Murder.

A Tale of Three Careers
Former German professor Peter Steiner makes good as cartoonist and novelist

The thing about Peter Steiner is, he’s pretty close to perfect. He’s gracious, good-looking, creative, articulate, successful, and he makes a very pleasing cup of cappuccino. Knowing Peter Steiner reminds one of the old shampoo ads, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” In his case, it’s don’t hate him because he’s perfect. One simply can’t.

No wonder he was known as a good-guy professor when he taught German at Dickinson in the 1970s. And now, 25 years after he gave up his tenured position to pursue what then seemed an impossible dream—becoming a cartoonist for The New Yorker—he’s still sought out by former students like President William G. Durden ’71 as a draw for major fundraising and alumni club events. Most recently, he read excerpts from his first published novel, A French Country Murder, at a Washington, D.C., club event. And though he and wife Jane moved from northern Virginia to northwestern Connecticut in the early fall, he plans to return to campus in January to teach a short course on creativity.

The road from professor to cartoonist to novelist wasn’t as rocky as one might imagine. Steiner chalks that up to tenacity and hard work. Getting a job at a college that wouldn’t have admitted him as an undergraduate (due to lackluster high-school grades) wasn’t a stretch. In graduate school, after serving in the U.S. Army in Germany, Steiner worked hard and efficiently, sailing through his dissertation and into Carlisle.

When he grew tired of teaching German literature and language he turned to a first love—the drawing and painting he’d begun as a child in Cincinnati. While his first wife taught at a college in Georgia, he submitted a batch of cartoons each week to The New Yorker.

“I just kept plugging away on a project that probably would never go somewhere,” he says. “At least with the dissertation I got a degree.” After two years, the magazine bit and bought a Steiner cartoon. Since then he’s been submitting batches every week, sometimes selling a sketch or two.

Around the time he made it into The New Yorker’s select circle, he was hired as a cartoonist for a new, conservative newspaper, The Washington Times. Being a liberal, he feared it would be a bad fit but, 22 years later, he’s still creating six cartoons a week “that are about politics but are not your usual caricature of Bush.” For instance, he might lampoon a city ordinance on pollution control by showing Yuppies riding around in a Hummer.

He also does a cartoon a week for The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, and once a month for AARP Magazine, published by the American Association of Retired Persons. If you count the weekly batches of New Yorker cartoons, that amounts to about 1,400 cartoons a year.

His prolific cartooning has helped Steiner make the transition to another career—novelist.

For the last several years Steiner has been writing novels at night, while during the day he doodles ideas on a yellow legal pad before transforming them, via pen and ink, into humorous and telling cartoons.

A French Country Murder, a tale of political intrigue, corruption and jealousy, debuted to fine reviews in March. Steiner, who owns a cottage in the Loire Valley in France, depicts the culture and countryside quite expertly.

He also has written three other novels, none of which, like Steiner himself, can be neatly categorized. One is an “academic” novel called The Plagiarist, while one deals satirically with the abortion issue and another depicts the Holocaust. While revising the three unpublished novels and mulling over an offer from St. Martin’s, the publisher of his murder mystery, to write a sequel, he is mid-way through writing a new novel, a political satire.

How can one person pursue so many creative avenues?

“My business for the last 25 years has been generating ideas. I’m not the least bit intimidated by a blank page. I could write about nothing, or if someone told me to write a novel about venetian blinds I could do it. Cartooning is great training for the futility of the blank page.”

—Sherri Kimmel

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