IF YOU WANT a quick fix on what upper-middle-class Americans were doing between the two World Wars, look at the cartoons of Gluyas Williams. It will take less time than reading Dodsworth or the works of J. P. Marquand, and will be just as accurate. Accurate observation was the essence of Williams’s art, and he was, in the words of one magazine editor, a “superb noticer.”

As a rule, Williams drew only those things that he had observed personally. Years after he retired, he described his working methods this way: “I’d watch for things to happen at the West Newton Station in the morning or evening—things like somebody trying to get through the station door to buy a paper, just as everyone else surges out to board the train; or trying to get a taxi at the station on a rainy night; or the way everyone in the station starts for the platform when a train rumbles by, and it’s usually a freight train; all those little everyday occurrences can be built into cartoons.”

The pen-and-ink technique he used to record his observations owed much to the work of Aubrey Beardsley. At first it is difficult to see what Beardsley’s erotic, serpentine illustrations have in common with Williams’s open, sunny drawings, but the use of solid black shapes in an otherwise delicate line drawing is common to both. In fact, Williams was so in awe of Beardsley’s work that he never used white paint to correct a line, because he believed (erroneously) that Beardsley never “whited out” mistakes.

Williams probably was introduced to Beardsley’s work by his older sister Kate, an art student, when both were still living at home in San Francisco. By the time he arrived at Harvard, his sister already had embarked on a career as a magazine illustrator (using her married name, Carew), and this may have encouraged Williams to pursue a similar career. Gluyas (it is a Cornish name) became art editor of The Harvard Lampoon in 1910 .

That year Robert Benchley, a lower classmate who wished to contribute to the humor magazine, showed his cartoons to the art editor. Williams (according to Benchley) suggested he go into writing. Years later, when Benchley’s first book of essays was published, Williams illustrated it. When Williams’s first collection of cartoons was published in 1929, Benchley wrote the introduction.

In time Williams would illustrate all of Benchley’s books, which meant doing hundreds of caricatures of the pudgy author. Sometimes it seemed as though he could not stop. At least it seemed that way to Benchley: “There is only one drawback in having been Mr. Williams’s model for so many pictures. After years of capturing those particular facial characteristics of which my mother is so fond, he has quite unconsciously taken to putting me into all his drawings, commercial and otherwise, as the typical American Sap. I glance at an advertisement for