Peter Steiner has had a variety of careers and lived in a handful of cities. The former German professor and longtime New Yorker cartoonist (he's published over 400 cartoons in the magazine and his drawing captioned 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.' is the most reproduced cartoon in the publication's history) is now a Sharon, Conn. resident and crime novelist. His fifth book, The Capitalist, was released just this month. Steiner will discuss and sign copies of his thriller on Thursday, March 10 at 7 p.m. at the Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield. I’ve had a variety of careers. I started as a college professor teaching German at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and then left after a while to become an artist. I painted and drew cartoons, and the cartoons sold better than the paintings, so I went in that direction. I eventually became a cartoonist for The New Yorker and did that up until about three or four years ago. Toward the end of my career as a cartoonist, I started writing novels. I don’t know why, but maybe I was interested in it because I had been a literature teacher and thought that I understood how it worked and wanted to give it a try.
I didn’t sell the first novel I wrote, but I sold the second one through an agent to St. Martin’s. It got very nice reviews, but it didn’t sell well at all. But I enjoyed writing so much that I started writing another. It’s been almost 20 years since I started writing, and my fifth book is coming out soon. I’ve lived in a variety of places. I lived in Carlisle, PA when I was teaching at Dickinson; then in Georgia for a while; and in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in Virginia. Eventually it became clear when my wife retired that we could live wherever we wanted. I’d never lived near New York City, so I drew a circle 100 miles around the city, as many people do. We visited and fell in love with Northwest Connecticut. I remember thinking, ‘these people live in a park, every drive is wonderful, I could do that.’ That was about 13 years ago. My wife and I do a lot of hiking and walking the Appalachian Trail, and do some volunteer work with the elementary schools in Sharon and Torrington. This summer I'll be a part of the Annual Sharon Summer Book Signing in August.
