Charles Addams joined the layout department of
True Detective magazine in 1933, where he retouched photos of corpses to remove the blood for appearance alongside magazine stories. Addams complained: "A lot of those corpses were more interesting the way they were." The New Yorker Obituary of October 17, 1988, says his first drawing for
The New Yorker ran in February 1932. However, his first drawing actually appeared in the February 4, 1933, issue. Here he drew the first in the series that came to be called
The Addams Family on August 6, 1938, and ran regularly until his death. Addams remained a freelancer throughout that time. Addams created a 1952 mural for the bar of a
Hamptons hotel. It is now located in the library at
Penn State and depicts prominent Addams Family members. Television producer David Levy approached Addams with an offer to create
The Addams Family television series, with a little help from the humorist. Addams gave his characters names as well as qualities for actors to use in portrayals; the series ran on ABC from 1964 to 1966.
Dear Dead Days (1959) is a scrapbook-like compendium of vintage images (and occasional pieces of text) that appealed to the author's sense of the grotesque, including Victorian woodcuts, vintage medicine-show advertisements, and a boyhood photograph of
Francesco Lentini, who had three legs. Addams drew more than 1,300 cartoons over the course of his life. Beyond
The New Yorker pages, his cartoons appeared in ''
Collier's and TV Guide'', as well as books, calendars, and other merchandise. The 1957 album
Ghost Ballads, featuring folk songs with supernatural themes by singer-guitarist
Dean Gitter, was packaged with cover art by Addams depicting a haunted house. The
Mystery Writers of America honored Addams with a Special
Edgar Award in 1961 for his body of work. The films
The Old Dark House (1963) and
Murder by Death (1976) feature title sequences illustrated by Addams. In 1946, Addams met science-fiction writer
Ray Bradbury after having drawn an illustration for
Mademoiselle magazine's publication of Bradbury's short story "Homecoming", the first in a series of tales chronicling a family of Illinois
vampires named the Elliotts. The pair became friends and planned to collaborate on a book of the Elliott Family's complete history with Bradbury writing and Addams providing the illustrations, but it never materialized. Bradbury's stories about the "Elliott Family" were finally anthologized in
From the Dust Returned in October 2001, with a connecting narrative and an explanation of his work with Addams, and Addams's 1946
Mademoiselle illustration used for the book's cover jacket. Although Addams's own characters were well-established by the time of their initial encounter, in a 2001 interview, Bradbury stated: "[Addams] went his way and created the Addams Family, and I went my own way and created my family in this book."
Janet Maslin, in a review of an Addams biography for
The New York Times, wrote: "Addams's persona sounds cooked up for the benefit of feature writers ... was at least partly a character contrived for the public eye," noting that one outré publicity photo showed the humorist wearing a suit of armor at home, "but the shelves behind him hold books about painting and antiques, as well as a novel by
John Updike." Filmmaker
Alfred Hitchcock was a friend of Addams, and owned two pieces of original Addams art. Hitchcock references Addams in his 1959 film
North by Northwest. During the auction scene,
Cary Grant discovers two of his adversaries with someone who he also thinks is against him and says: "The three of you together. Now that's a picture only Charles Addams could draw." ==Personal life==