Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The New Anthology From Off the Streets of by Harvey Pekar, Cleveland comic-book legend, dies at age 70. CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Harvey Pekar's life was not an open book. It was an open . Pekar chronicled his life and times in the acclaimed autobiographical comic book series, "American Splendor," portraying himself as a rumpled, depressed, obsessive-compulsive "flunky file clerk" engaged in a constant battle with loneliness and anxiety. Pekar, 70, was found dead shortly before 1 a.m. Monday by his wife, , in their Cleveland Heights home, said Powell Caesar, spokesman for Cuyahoga County Coroner Miller. An autopsy will be conducted to determine the cause of death. Pekar and Brabner wrote "," a book-length comic, after Pekar was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1990 and underwent a grueling treatment. He was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, and also suffered high blood pressure, asthma and clinical depression, which fueled his art but often made his life painful. "American Splendor" carried the subtitle, "From Off the Streets of Cleveland," and just like Superman, the other comic-book hero born in Cleveland, Pekar wore something of a disguise. He never stepped into a phone booth to change, but underneath his persona of aggravated, disaffected file clerk, he was an erudite book and jazz critic, and a writer of short stories that many observers compared to Chekhov, despite their comic-book form. Unlike the superheroes who ordinarily inhabit the pages of comic books, Pekar could neither leap tall buildings in a single bound, nor move faster than a speeding bullet. Yet his comics suggested a different sort of heroism: The working-class, everyman heroics of simply making it through another day, with soul -- if not dignity -- intact. "American Splendor" had its roots in Pekar's friendship with R. Crumb, the seminal underground comic-book artist. The two met in 1962 when Crumb was working for American Greetings in Cleveland. At the time, Crumb was just beginning to explore the possibilities of comics, which would later lead to such groundbreaking work as "Mr. Natural" and "." Harvey Pekar Links. The Harvey Heads: A tribute "American Splendor": The Movie Friends remember Pekar: Entertainment Weekly Pekar's last interview, with blogtalkradio.com. Previous Plain Dealer coverage. When Pekar, inspired by Crumb's work, wrote his nascent strip in 1972, Crumb illustrated it. Crumb also contributed to Pekar's first full-fledged books, which Pekar started publishing annually in 1976. "He's the soul of Cleveland," Crumb told The Plain Dealer in 1994. "He's passionate and articulate. He's grim. He's Jewish. I appreciate the way he embraces all that darkness." Yet the darkness came with a humorous silver lining. As Pekar said, "The humor of everyday life is way funnier than what the comedians do on TV. It's the stuff that happens right in front of your face when there's no routine and everything is unexpected. That's what I want to write about." Pekar often complained that he made no money from his comics, but they did not go unappreciated. He won the American Book Award in 1987 for his first anthology of "American Splendor." He was a regular guest on "Late Night With David Letterman," until they had a falling out. (Letterman declined to comment.) And in 2003, the film adaptation of his comics, also titled "American Splendor," won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic films at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. Pekar reacted to the prize with his characteristic mordant wit. "I'm always shook up and nervous and I've got the hospital record to prove it," he said that night. "I wake up every morning in a cold sweat, regardless of how well things went the day before. And put that I said that in a somewhat but not completely tongue-in-cheek way." Pekar was born Oct. 8, 1939, to Saul and Dora Pekar, who had emigrated from Bialystok, Poland. His father, a Talmudic scholar, owned a small grocery store on Kinsman Avenue, and the family -- who included Harvey's younger brother, Allen, a chemist -- lived above the store. He graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1957, and went on to Case Western Reserve University, dropping out after a year when the pressure of required math classes proved too much to bear. He served in the Navy, then returned to Cleveland and a series of menial jobs before landing at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Cleveland as a file clerk, a job he would hold until he retired in 2001. He was married three times, the last to Brabner, whom he met in 1983 when she wrote to him asking for an issue of "American Splendor." They were married on their third date, and a comic book naturally followed. "American Splendor No. 10" was subtitled, "Harvey's Latest Crapshoot: His Third Marriage to a Sweetie from Delaware and How His Substandard Dishwashing Strains Their Relationship." They became legal guardians of Danielle Batone when she was 9 years old, in 1998, "raising her as our own," Pekar said. After he retired from the VA hospital, Pekar continued to write jazz reviews and "American Splendor," garnering the accolades of his peers and critics. In 1989, the New York Times Book Review said, "Mr. Pekar's work has been compared by literary critics to Chekhov's and Dostoevski's, and it's easy to see why." ISBN 13: 9780941423649. The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland. Pekar, Harvey. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. American Splendor is the series that sparked a revolution in comics and brought graphic novels to the attention of post-adolescent readers everywhere. Here is the best of American Splendor and other comics by Harvey Pekar, including never-before-seen material. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Shipping: FREE Within U.S.A. Customers who bought this item also bought. Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace. 1. The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland. Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780941423649. 2. The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland. Book Description Condition: New. . Seller Inventory # 536ZZZ00U9UK_ns. 3. The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland. Book Description Condition: New. A+ Customer service! Satisfaction Guaranteed! Book is in NEW condition. Seller Inventory # 0941423646- 2-1. 4. The New American Splendor Anthology: From Off the Streets of Cleveland. Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Brand New!. Seller Inventory # 0941423646. 5. 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Harvey Pekar, whose autobiographical comic book “American Splendor” attracted a cult following for its unvarnished stories of a depressed, aggrieved Everyman negotiating daily life in Cleveland and became the basis for a critically acclaimed 2003 film, died on Monday at his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He was 70. A spokesman for the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office said that no cause of death had yet been determined. Capt. Michael Cannon of the Cleveland Heights Police Department, which was summoned to Mr. Pekar’s home by his wife, Joyce Brabner, told The Associated Press that Mr. Pekar had suffered from prostate cancer, asthma, high blood pressure and depression. Mr. Pekar (pronounced PEE-kar), who toiled for nearly 40 years as a file clerk in a Veterans Administration hospital, applied the brutally frank autobiographical style of Henry Miller to the comic-book format, creating a distinctive series of dispatches from an all-too-ordinary life. His alter ego, introduced in 1976, trudged on from episode to episode, quarreling with co-workers, dealing with car problems, addressing family crises and fretting over money matters and health problems. “Harvey was like the original blogger, before there was an Internet,” said , an artist who worked with Mr. Pekar on “American Splendor” and “The Quitter,” his memoir. “He was ‘Seinfeld’ before ‘Seinfeld.’ Comics, which had been power fantasies for 12-year-old boys, could now be about anything.” Since he could not draw, Mr. Pekar enlisted top comic-book artists to do the illustrations, notably R. Crumb, who had encouraged him to publish and contributed illustrations for the first issues of “American Splendor.” Later issues were illustrated by Gary Dumm, Greg Budgett and Mark Zingarelli. “It dawned on me that comics were not an intrinsically limited medium,” Mr. Pekar told Interview magazine in 2009. “There was a tremendous amount of things you could do in comics that you couldn’t do in other art forms ​ but no one was doing it. I figured if I’d make a try at it, I’d at least be a footnote in history.” Harvey Lawrence Pekar was born on Oct. 8, 1939, in Cleveland, where his parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, ran a neighborhood grocery store. The neighborhood, once white, became mostly black in the 1940s, and Harvey was the target of local youths who called him “white cracker” and routinely beat him up. The experience, he later theorized, instilled a profound sense of inferiority. After the family moved to a white neighborhood, Mr. Pekar found that the constant fighting paid off. In one-on-one combat, he usually emerged the victor, and he became a respected street scrapper. At the same time, he nourished deep-seated anxieties and compulsions that made him fearful of taking on any challenge, one of the major themes of “The Quitter” (2005). A series of dead-end jobs led to enlistment in the Navy, which discharged him when his anxieties made it impossible for him to pass inspections. Mr. Pekar resumed working a string of low-paying jobs, usually clerical. In 1965 he found a permanent roost with the Veterans Administration, where he turned down all offers of promotion and remained a file clerk until he retired in 2001. On the side, however, Mr. Pekar began writing articles for Jazz Review in the late 1950s, and later for British jazz magazines and Downbeat. He also struck up a friendship, in 1962, with R. Crumb, a fellow jazz enthusiast and record collector then living in Cleveland. In Mr. Crumb’s early work he saw new possibilities in the comic-book form. He began sketching out stories with stick-figure illustrations. Mr. Crumb, impressed, encouraged him to publish and showed his work to other artists, who also saw what Mr. Crumb saw. Mr. Pekar’s humble tales “from off the streets of Cleveland,” as the subtitle to “American Splendor” has it, resonated with enough readers to keep the experiment alive. “I always wanted praise and I always wanted attention; I won’t lie to you,” he told Interview magazine in 2009. “I was a jazz critic and that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted people to write about me, not me about them.” The cantankerous Mr. Pekar, who published the first 15 issues of “American Splendor” himself, became a regular on “Late Night With David Letterman” for two years in the late 1980s, until he went on a memorable tirade against , the parent company of NBC, and was dropped for several years from the show’s guest list. Wider fame came with the film, a quirky blend of documentary footage, animation and fiction. Mr. Pekar and his wife were played by Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, but Mr. Pekar provided the narration and slipped into several scenes in both live and animated form. He wrote about the film in “Our Movie Year” (2004). In addition to “American Splendor,” Mr. Pekar wrote several biographies, including “American Splendor: Unsung Hero” (2003), about the Vietnam War experiences of Robert McNeill, a fellow worker at the VA hospital. Mr. Pekar’s other books include “Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History” (2008), “The Beats” (2009) and “Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation” (2009) as well as “Our Cancer Year” (1994), an account of his treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which he wrote with his wife. Mr. Pekar’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Danielle. Success did not seem to ease Mr. Pekar’s existential predicament. “Of course I don’t think I have it made by any means,” his alter ego said in a cartoon in Entertainment Weekly in 2003. “I’m too insecure, obsessive and paranoid for that.” Search AbeBooks. We're sorry; the page you requested could not be found. AbeBooks offers millions of new, used, rare and out-of-print books, as well as cheap textbooks from thousands of booksellers around the world. 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