Monroe Eisenberg was born September 9, 1914 in Dickson City, Pennsylvania, which is just north of Scranton. His parents were both Austrian Jewish immigrants, who had followed a mass migration of impoverished Galicians to work in the area's coal mines. His father was Harry Eisenberg and his mother was Anna Eisenberg. His older sister was Marion. They lived at 508 Main Street. His father was a salesman at a drygoods store.
In 1922 his father became a salesman at a coffee company and the family moved to Fairfield Connecticut. They lived at 178 Poplar Street, which they rented for $45 monthly.
He graduated high school in June of 1932, and in the Fall he began to attend Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied with H. Winfield Scott, John Fleming Gould, and Rudolph Belarski.
In 1934, after three years of study at Pratt Institute, he moved back home to live with his family at 85 Laurel Place in Bridgeport, CT, where he opened his own freelance art studio.
In 1935 he was a writer, penciler, and inker for New Fun Comics.
In 1936 he painted a few pulp cover illustrations for West Magazine, which was a Ranger Publication, but he became much more active as a pen & ink pulp artist drawing interior story illustrations for Ace-High Magazine, Clues Detective Stories, Pioneer Western, and Ten Story Western Magazine.
Although the U.S.A. did not formally enter WWII until after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the draft law had been imposed since 1940 to prepare military forces. On March 15, 1941 Monroe Eisenberg enlisted in the Army Air Corps as an Aviation Cadet. He was recorded to be five-foot-ten and to weigh 152 pounds. He was single and without dependents.
After the war he worked for Popular Publications as a pen & ink artist, cover artist, and also a writer. He wrote the story, "Tallowpot," which was published in the July 1954 issue of Rail Road Magazine. It is quite rare for a pulp artist to also be a pulp author, but other examples are Frederick Blakeslee, Hannes Bok, and H. W. Kiemle.
During the 1960s his illustrations appeared in Readers Digest and Time Magazine. In 1966 he moved to 20 Oakwood Drive in Westport, CT. He served as President of the Westport Artists Guild.
In the 1970s he illustrated books for school children, which were published by McGraw-Hill, Abingdon Press, Scholastic, and Troll Associates.
In 1983 he moved to San Diego, California, where he worked as a portrait artist.
Monroe Eisenberg died in San Diego, CA, at the age of eighty-five on April 11, 1999.
© David Saunders 2009 |
