The Press: Block Party

Washington's Corcoran Gallery, which prides itself on showing the best in modern American art, housed a newcomer last week. The debutant, a shy, gentle man with a Pinocchio-sized nose, was the Washington Post's cartoonist, Herbert Lawrence Block, 40. He had won a Pulitzer Prize (1942), but he'd never seen anything like this. Eyeing the 194 cartoons, all signed with the economy-size pen name (Herblock), one dowager gushed to Block: "There's a complete timelessness about your cartoons. They'll last, I think, for at least ten years."

It was not his timelessness but his topicality that had made Herblock one of the most widely...