In 1988, the publisher and editor Michael di Capua saw some sketches of a surprising new story from one of his most popular authors: William Steig, a writer and illustrator known for wobbly-lined watercolors and gently biting children’s tales.
“His books were sunny, in a sweet-natured way,” di Capua recalled in an interview. “They made you feel good after reading them.”
Which is why di Capua became uneasy as he examined the rough pages of Steig’s latest effort. It was the story of a pinheaded, pimply-faced ogre so repulsive that his body odor could topple trees.
“I was horrified,” said di Capua, who is 87. “I told him it was an aberration. I don’t think I used that word, but that’s what I was thinking.”
At his editor’s urging, Steig put the project aside for a while, only to pick it up again during a brief creative dry spell. Finally, di Capua relented, and the finished book hit shelves in the fall of 1990. Its opening line introduced a character who’d soon enchant millions of readers and moviegoers.
“His mother was ugly and his father was ugly,” Steig wrote, “but Shrek was uglier than the two of them put together.”
“Shrek!” follows its grotesque protagonist as he leaves the comforts of his swamp, meets a put-upon donkey and woos an equally hideous princess. Like many of Steig’s children’s books, it is short, sharp and slightly askew.
“A modest achievement,” noted a review in The Washington Post, “but a perfect one.”
It was likely the last time anyone would associate Steig’s mean, green creation with modesty. In the spring of 2001, a big-screen version of “Shrek!” — minus the exclamation mark and plus the actor Mike Myers — arrived in theaters. The film earned nearly $500 million worldwide and launched a franchise that now includes a Tony Award-winning musical and a planned theme park attraction in Texas.
For the last quarter-century, Shrek’s likeness has been adopted, spoofed, transformed and even tattooed by admirers. Online, the character’s expressive face — sometimes menacing, sometimes questioning — has fueled countless GIFs and memes. In real life, revelers across the globe have attended late-night Shrek raves, and performers as distinct as Regis Philbin and Bad Bunny have donned lime-green face paint in homage to the ogre.
Steig died in 2003, at the age of 95. But according to his youngest daughter, Maggie Steig, the writer and illustrator would have been delighted, if a bit baffled, by Shrek’s transformation from unseemly kid-lit hero to multimedia all-star.
“Seeing Bad Bunny show up in Shrek ears on ‘SNL’ would have tickled him,” Maggie Steig, 67, said in an interview. “But when it came to tattoos, I think he would have said, ‘They’re putting Shrek on their bodies? Feh!’”
Born in Brooklyn in 1907 to working-class Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Steig played water polo and studied art in his youth but dreamed of heading out to sea like Herman Melville. His hopes were dashed when the stock market crashed in 1929, prompting his out-of-work father to ask him to support the family.
“My father was a socialist,” Steig once said in an interview with children’s literature expert Leonard S. Marcus. “He said, ‘If you work for someone, you’re being exploited. If you’re the boss, you’re the exploiter.’ He said both of these are undesirable positions to be in. So he encouraged the arts.”
Steig began selling his art to publications including The New Yorker, to which he’d ultimately contribute more than a thousand illustrations. He made his debut in the magazine in 1930 with a cartoon featuring two prisoners commiserating in a cell. (“My youngest is a terror,” explains one. “We can’t do a thing with ’im.”)
Later, he worked on greeting cards, advertising campaigns and even a book with the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Yet Steig was best known for his cartoons, which often featured precocious children, immature adults and a good dose of ennui.
“I don’t think a completely joyous guy would be a cartoonist, because satirizing implies you’re unhappy about something,” Steig once said.
Steig grew tired of commercial gigs by the late 1960s, when he began working on children’s books. Maggie Steig, who grew up spending weekends with her father in his Greenwich Village apartment, recalls him constantly drawing.
“There were always reams of doodles he would be making while he was talking on the kitchen phone,” she said.
That might help explain Steig’s prolific output. He wrote or illustrated dozens of children’s books, sometimes releasing multiple titles in a single year.
Many of his works featured adorable animals facing existential crises. “Abel’s Island” follows a mouse who must fend for himself after a storm separates him from his wife. In “Doctor De Soto,” a pragmatic mouse dentist must decide whether to treat a toothache-plagued fox.
“His characters ponder the Big Questions, grapple with issues of death and evil and other mysterious forces,” a critic noted in Newsday in 1985.
Despite the sometimes heavy themes, Steig’s books were never nasty or preachy — possibly because he related to his young readers.
“He loved to play,” Maggie Steig said. “And he felt that amusing kids with a good story was an intrinsic pleasure. When he would go to a party, it was over for him when the kids went to bed.”
When “Shrek!” was published, it earned Steig, who was already a critical darling, another round of favorable reviews. But the book wasn’t a blockbuster. A few years later, the book found its way to the film producer John H. Williams, whose two young sons discovered Steig’s works at their local library. “Shrek!” quickly became their favorite.
“They wanted to read it over and over again,” Williams recalled in an interview. “My 5-year-old was reciting it from memory.”
At the time, “The Simpsons” was one of the hottest shows on the air. Williams saw a kinship between that program’s irreverent cultural critiques and Steig’s cracked-mirror view of classic fairy-tale tropes. Williams optioned Steig’s book, eventually selling it to a newly launched film studio, DreamWorks.
It took more than five years to bring “Shrek” to theaters. The filmmakers, struggling to adapt Steig’s slim story into a feature film, introduced new subplots and supporting characters, including Pinocchio and the Gingerbread Man.
Shrek himself got an onscreen makeover, physically and emotionally. The ogre was redesigned with a rounder head and bigger eyes, and his gruff demeanor was smoothed out — as was the love story that ends both the book and the movie.
Steig had little involvement in the film but did suggest one scene early in the movie, where Shrek happily farts in a swamp.
The author finally saw a rough cut of “Shrek” at a private screening in Boston in early 2001. He’d recently turned 93, and was increasingly immobile.
“We didn’t have a wheelchair for him yet, so someone from the theater went and got a wheeled office chair,” recalled Maggie Stein. “My father was strong enough to be able to lift his legs up, so I pushed him in that chair to the theater and sat by him. And in the screening, he promptly fell asleep.”
Steig made it through a second viewing, however, and later weighed in with his review. “The people who made it knew their stuff,” the author told a reporter from USA Today.
Not long before the movie’s screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, Steig received a note from the DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who wrote, “It all started with you and I hope we really made you proud.” The studio had bet big on “Shrek,” hyping its release with countless tie-in products, from green-colored ketchup to a “Shrek Swamp Fizz” drink.
The film opened at No. 1 in May 2001, and Steig’s book was suddenly in high demand. (“Our sales are running 400 percent over normal annual sales,” an associate publisher at Farrar, Straus and Giroux noted at the time.)
Less than a year later, Steig’s name was read before millions of viewers when “Shrek” won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The ogre even made a brief cameo at the ceremony.
Steig was still working then, despite his advanced age and fading health. In the spring of 2003, he released an illustrated memoir, “When Everybody Wore A Hat.” He died less than six months later.
“He was going to the very end,” said Holly McGhee, Steig’s former editor and literary agent. “It wasn’t until he put down his drawing pen that he passed away.”
The author never got to see his off-putting ogre become a pop-cultural phenomenon adored by multiple generations despite, or perhaps because of, his foul nature.
But when “Shrek 2” arrived in May of 2004 — the first of several sequels, including one planned for next year — it was dedicated to Steig.
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