Although Thomas Nast (1840–1902) was not America's first political cartoonist, he is almost universally considered the father of modern political cartoons. Nast turned political art into character assassination with his biting portrayals of Confederate sympathizers and Tammany Hall. He also is generally credited with inventing the donkey and elephant as representatives of the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively. The donkey as Democrat actually pre-dates Nast. Still, he employed both to reach a broad audience, making his impact upon political imagery still powerful more than a century after his death.

Fiona Deans Halloran provides the first book-length biography of Thomas Nast since Albert Bigelow Paine's authorized volume of 1904. Halloran's biography offers many valuable insights into Nast's worldview, which so obviously resonated with that of the northern middle class of Gilded Age America. According to the author, it was the events of Nast's youth that shaped his values and prejudices, not him consciously adopting the values of his WASP patrons. Although she is forced to piece together the events and influences of Nast's youth from Paine's conversations with Nast, she does a fine job in separating fact from the fiction that normally weakens such hagiography.

Nast emigrated from his native Bavaria at the age of ten. His father, who sympathized with the revolutionaries of 1848 in Europe, took four more years to arrive. This background gave Nast a lifelong sympathy for liberal causes and middle-class values. He struggled with the English language, dropped out of school early, and pursued his obvious talent for drawing by his mid-teens. Growing up near New York City's Five Points, the center of New York City's Irish American culture, brought more disgust than sympathy. Halloran believes that bullying by neighborhood hooligans and the 1863 Draft Riot violence against African Americans account for Nast's anti-Irish views, not WASP nativism. His animosity toward Catholics, likewise, probably germinated from the Church's association with the Irish in America and his sympathies for the European revolutionaries of 1848. Still, his personal views remained rather traditional. Halloran identifies Nast as a cradle Catholic who in later life joined an Episcopal Church noted for its Anglo Catholic sentiments. Nevertheless, his drawing of crocodiles dressed as mitered bishops emerging from the river Ganges to devour America's youth remains one of the iconic images of American nativism.

For Thomas Nast the American Success Story was no myth. After a brief apprenticeship with an artist, he latched on to Frank Leslie's Illustrated News at the time such sensationalistic journals were becoming the rage. Nast worked for several papers in his early years. His work even took him to London and Italy in 1860. Upon his return in 1861, Nast began working for Harper's Weekly. He was vehemently pro-Union, and rather than depict specific events in detail, he designed his wartime drawings to reflect the emotions of the northern struggle.

Nast's overtly partisan political career began with his cartoon, “Compromise with the South,” in 1864. The image of a triumphant Confederate with his boot resting upon the grave of a Union soldier made him an immediate favorite among Republicans. Nast's work in support of Ulysses S. Grant during the presidential campaigns of 1868 and 1872 likewise raised his stature in the GOP to dizzying heights and created a lifelong friend in the president, who became Nast's greatest hero.

Nast's 1871 campaign against Tammany Hall's William M. Tweed produced his most enduring images. He had a devastating talent for sarcasm. In “Who stole the People's Money?,” Nast portrayed New York City grafters (including Tweed) standing in a circle, each pointing to the man on his right. In “The Brains,” he drew a bloated Tweed with a money bag for his head. Tweed allegedly responded, “Let's stop them damned pictures … my constituents can't read, but damned they can see pictures.” Whether he made the infamous comment or not is controversial. Halloran believes it probably came from a private conversation, as opposed to being a fabrication.

With the success of the Tweed campaign, Nast finally acquired a permanent contract with Harper's Weekly and a regular place on the lyceum circuit that secured his personal finances. Nast had married into a prominent middle-class, WASP family and proved to be quite the doting father and family man. He moved his family to the cultured serenity of Morristown, New Jersey, in 1873 and commuted irregularly by rail afterward. Beginning in 1863, and continuing into the 1890s, Nast took special pride in recasting the traditional figure of Father Christmas into the modern image of Santa Claus.

The Tweed exposé of 1871 and Grant campaign of 1872 signaled Nast's most prolific years. Exhausted, both physically and emotionally, Nast became less productive thereafter, particularly after his publisher, Fletcher Harper, died in 1877. Harper had protected Nast's intellectual freedom from editor George William Curtis, who believed the paper's cartoons should reflect the editor's policies and sensibilities. Curtis and Nast agreed on most issues, but Curtis was far more genteel and easily offended by Nast's rude portrayals of Curtis's acquaintances and social class. Having lost his struggle for intellectual freedom, Nast's cartoons lost much of their bite after 1877. He returned his contract for 1887 unsigned. In 1892, Nast attempted to restart his career with Nast's Weekly. Economic depression soon set in, and Tammany Hall controlled newspaper delivery in New York City. The project was short lived.

Thomas Nast invested unwisely in the 1880s. To repair his finances, he eventually sought a consular post. Nast had hoped for Germany or Great Britain, but Ecuador was the only post available. He died of yellow fever a few months after arriving. To survive, his widow auctioned off many of her husband's belongings. This scattered the materials necessary to construct a proper biography. Fiona Deans Halloran, however, has met the challenge of documentation admirably and produced an insightful and superbly illustrated biography of Thomas Nast that is highly recommended for students of art, Gilded Age politics, American culture during the last half of the nineteenth century, or cartoons in general.