The second was a secretive married woman whom Bair describes as the “brittle, fast-talking” Ada Ongari, née Cassola. Rosa was the first of four women who played leading roles in his life. By contrast, Bair writes, Steinberg’s bulky, self-dramatizing mother, Rosa, had “the appearance of a dreadnought in full sail,” ferociously dominating her husband, her son, and her daughter, Lica, who was a year older than Steinberg and, while they were growing up, his soul mate. His father, Moritz, was a slight and timid man, a printer and bookbinder who was forced by finances to become a manufacturer of cardboard boxes. Steinberg was born in 1914 in the small town of Râmnicu-Sărat, in eastern Romania, to parents of Russian Jewish extraction. His unmistakable style mixed the graphic precision of an architect with the leaping fantasy of a poet. Steinberg and his wife, Hedda Sterne, an Abstract Expressionist artist, in 1951. She repeatedly cites Steinberg’s self-description as “a writer who draws,” and she quotes his claim, made to an interviewer in 1973, that he belonged “in the family of Stendhal and Joyce.” There’s a ring of truth there, but also a quaver of the frustrated ambition that is a leitmotif in Bair’s account of a laureate of urbane smarts in mid-to-late-twentieth-century America-a country that, for all his kidding of its hubbub and razzmatazz, he explored and thoroughly knew, and enjoyed. He was just so original and virtuosic that a different term can feel called for. Steinberg was an artist if cartooning is an art-which it is, and so he was. Timelessly tantalizing, “View of the World” is surely art. The image, which premièred on the cover of the March 29, 1976, issue of The New Yorker, is the most famous of the thousands of dashingly styled, brain-challenging drawings that he published in the magazine and elsewhere in a career that ended only with his death, in 1999, at the age of eighty-four. Talese/Doubleday), a luxuriant and unsettling biography of “the man who did that poster”-“View of the World from Ninth Avenue,” a hilariously foreshortened vista, across the Hudson River, of the United States.

Was Saul Steinberg an artist? Deirdre Bair raises the question, which has vexed other writers, in “Saul Steinberg” (Nan A.

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