Robert C. Osborn
| Robert C. Osborn | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Robert Chesley Osborn October 26, 1904 Oshkosh, Wisconsin, US |
| Died | December 20, 1994 (aged 90) Salisbury, Connecticut, US |
| Education | Yale University |
| Occupation | Cartoonist |
| Employer | The New Republic, Fortune, Harper's, Life, Look, Esquire, The New York Times, House & Garden, U.S. Navy, Naval Aviation News |
| Known for |
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| Spouse(s) | Elodie Osborn |
Robert Chesley Osborn (1904–1994) was an American satiric cartoonist, illustrator and author.
Osborn was born October 26, 1904, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He witnessed a fatal aviation crash in June 1916.He entered the University of Wisconsin in 1923, then transferred to Yale in 1923. At Yale, together with Dwight Macdonald, Wilder Hobson, Geoffrey T. Hellman, and Jack Jessup, Osborn helped publish campus humor magazine The Yale Record and was accepted into Yale's Elizabethan Club.
After graduating from Yale in 1928, he studied painting in Rome and Paris, then returned to the U.S. and began teaching art and philosophy at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn.. He found breaking into the ranks of serious artists difficult, and he soon turned to caricature.
Osborn was in Austria in 1938, working as a tutor, when he was taken to a Hitler rally. His reaction to this event prefigured his famous disgust with mindless obedience and obeisance: "I was sickened and convinced that before us was a demon," he wrote. War seemed to him acceptable, "if that was the only way to rid the world of his evil.". He attempted to join the Spanish Republicans to fight Franco, and later applied to the Royal Canadian Air Force, being turned down on both occasions because of his chronic duodenal ulcer.
Osborn enlisted when World War II began, hoping to become a U.S. Navy pilot. However, the Navy apparently decided that he would be better employed with his hand wrapped around a pen rather than around a joystick: he was soon learning, then applying the art of "speed drawing", under the command of the photographer Edward Steichen in a special information unit in which pilot training manuals were produced. Osborn began drawing cartoons of a pilot who was hapless, arrogant, ignorant and perpetually blundering in ways that put himself and his crew at unnecessary risk. The name of this character was Dilbert Groundloop also known as "Dilbert the Pilot" and "Dilbert" was soon to become a slang term used to refer to "sailor who is a foul-up or a screwball."Scott Adams credits Osborn as an indirect source of inspiration for the main character in his own Dilbert cartoons. It is not certain how many drawings Osborn produced for Navy manuals; estimates range from 2,000 to 40,000. His Dilbert was used in numerous educational posters for Navy pilots, appeared in the New York Times and Life magazine; for a while, "dilbert" became a synonym for "blunder" for Navy pilots. In 1943, Dilbert was played by actor Huntz Hall in a US NAVY training film Don't Kill your Friends.
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