Karasz was born in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, the oldest of three children of Mary Huber Karasz and silversmith Samuel Karasz.^[2] One of her younger sisters was the fashion designer and textile artist Mariska Karasz. She studied art at the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts during a period when the reigning aesthetic owed much to the Wiener Werkstätte and was one of the first women to be admitted to the school.^[3] At the age of 17, she immigrated to the United States in 1913, and began to make a career for herself in New York City‘s Greenwich Village, where she established herself as an influential practitioner of modern art and design.^[4] In 1914, Karasz co-founded (with Winold Reiss) the European-American artists' collective Society of Modern Art, and shortly afterwards she was commissioned to create advertising for the department store Bonwit Teller. For a few years in the late teens she taught textile design at the Modern Art School.

During her late teens, Karasz taught textile design at the Modern Art School, an institution founded in 1915, where she taught alongside Marguerite and William Zorach. Karasz and a group of other European-born artists and designers, including Winold Reiss, founded the Society of Modern Art in 1914. The organization published Modern Art Collector, which published much of Karasz’s early designs. Her first work presented in the journal was a theatrical poster with checkerboard motifs, a common Austrian-German graphic style. The publication also showcased her bold, stylized floral patterns, cover designs, book illustrations, typography, and decorative panels.^[4]

Karasz was the founding director of Design Group, a firm of industrial designers, craftspeople, and artists. From the 1910s to the 1960s, her designs—inspired equally by folk art and modern art—found their way into a wide variety of textiles, wallpaper, rugs, ceramics, furniture, silverware, and toys.^[2] Between 1916 and 1918 she won several prizes (and gained visibility) for textile designs entered in competitions run by the fashion magazine Women's Wear. As early as 1918, she was being called "one of the best designers of modern textiles,"^[3] while by 1950 she was considered one of America's leading wallpaper designers, known for experimenting with different methods for transfer and layering of images.^[5] In the 1950s, she was one of a handful of artists selected by the aluminum manufacturer Alcoa to experiment with the use of aluminum for wall coverings.

Karasz did textile work throughout her career for manufacturers in the United States, including Mallinson, Schumacher, Lesher-Whitman, Dupont-Rayon, Schwarzenbach and Huber, Cheney, Susquehanna Silk Mills, Standard Textile, and Belding Brothers. One of her most successful designs, Oak Leaves, was commissioned by Lesher-Whitman and appeared in many publications on modern design and contemporary textiles. Karasz’s fellow designers considered her a pioneer in modern woven textiles in America, a field avoided by many textile creatives because of the requirement of having to understand the Jacquard loom.^[4]

Karasz ventured into a number of unusual areas connected with textile design and production. She was known as a pioneer of modern textile designs requiring the use of the Jacquard loom, and she became one of the few women to design textiles for planes and cars.^[2] In the late 1920s, Dupont-Rayon Company hired her to help improve the texture and feel of rayon and generally raise the production standards for this then-new material.^[2] Karasz experimented with many new materials and manufacturing processes throughout her career. Her work for F. Schumacher and Company in 1929 was used in a Fokker airplane.^[4]

Karasz's exploration of furniture and silverware was most intense in the late 1920s and 1930s. Her furniture was often rectilinear and strongly planar, inspired by the European De Stijl movement; she also designed a number of multifunctional pieces. In 1928, she was included in a European-American exhibition put on by Macy's department store in New York, alongside such prominent designers as Kem Weber, Bruno Paul, and Josef Hoffmann.^[2] In another 1928 exhibition, organized by American Designers' Gallery in New York, she was the only woman given responsibility for designing an entire room, and in fact she designed both a model studio apartment and a nursery.^[2] The latter is considered possibly the first modern nursery designed in America, and Karasz followed it up with several later nursery designs pragmatically featuring convertible furniture and washable fabrics.^[2] Her nursery designs focused on giving a child “an intimate sense of owning a room instead of being owned by it.” Rooms that allowed children to explore and develop intellectual, dramatic, and spatial capabilities.^[6] She also tried to incorporate elements that would help very young children learn, such as color-coded knobs on dressers.^[2] Her simple design aesthetic for furniture reflected the attention to designing for mass production.^[4]

From 1934-1937, Karasz designed and decorated ceramic dinnerware for Buffalo Pottery.^[7]

During the illustration portion of her career, Karasz was often referred to as the “hermit painter”. This nickname, however, misrepresents the repeated work she completed for various Greenwich Village publications and the impressions she made on peers.^[4] Karasz began painting covers for The New Yorker in 1924 and continued up to 1973.^[5] She had a total of 186 New Yorker covers across those six decades, many of them featuring lively vignettes of daily life viewed from above and drawn using unusual color combinations. She also created covers and illustrations for avant-garde magazines—including Guido Bruno's Bruno's Weekly, Modern Art Collector, and Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire—as well as for children's books such as The Heavenly Tenants. Less well known are the numerous maps she created, mostly for books but also as magazine covers.^[8]

In 1920 Karasz married Dutch chemist Willem Nyland (died 1975), with whom she had two children. They built a house in Brewster, New York, where Karasz lived for most of her life and which was featured in a 1928 spread in House Beautiful magazine. The couple lived in Java between 1929 and 1931, where Karasz complemented her eclectic mix of modern and traditional furnishings with murals that paid homage to the surrounding tropical foliage.^[2]

Karasz died at her daughter's home in Warwick, New York, seven weeks before her 85th birthday. The year after she died, the New York gallery Fifty/50 mounted a solo show of her work.^[8] In 2003, a retrospective of her paintings, prints, and drawings entitled "Enchanting Modern: Ilonka Karasz, 1896–1981," was mounted by the Georgia Museum of Art.^[9] Several dozen of her drawings and sample books for wallpaper, rugs, and metalware are in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt Museum.^[10]

It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric American culture, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of short stories and literary reviews, its rigorous fact checking and copy editing, its journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue.

The New Yorker was founded by Harold Ross (1892–1951) and his wife Jane Grant (1892–1972), a New York Times reporter, and debuted on February 21, 1925. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine that would be different from perceivably "corny" humor publications such as Judge, where he had worked, or the old Life. Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann (who founded the General Baking Company) to establish the F-R Publishing Company. The magazine's first offices were at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan. Ross edited the magazine until his death in 1951. During the early, occasionally precarious years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan sophistication. Ross declared in a 1925 prospectus for the magazine: "It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."

Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it soon established itself as a preeminent forum for serious fiction, essays and journalism. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue. The magazine has published short stories by many of the most respected writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Ann Beattie, Sally Benson, Maeve Brennan, Truman Capote, Rachel Carson, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Mavis Gallant, Geoffrey Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Ruth McKenney, John McNulty, Joseph Mitchell, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Philip Roth, George Saunders, J. D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, John Updike, Eudora Welty, and E. B. White. Publication of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" drew more mail than any other story in the magazine's history. In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two or even three short stories in an issue, but in later years the pace has remained steady at one story per issue.

The nonfiction feature articles (usually the bulk of an issue) cover an eclectic array of topics. Subjects have included eccentric evangelist Creflo Dollar, the different ways in which humans perceive the passage of time, and Münchausen syndrome by proxy.

The magazine is known for its editorial traditions. Under the rubric Profiles, it has published articles about prominent people such as Ernest Hemingway, Henry R. Luce and Marlon Brando, Hollywood restaurateur Michael Romanoff, magician Ricky Jay, and mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky. Other enduring features have been "Goings on About Town", a listing of cultural and entertainment events in New York, and "The Talk of the Town", a feuilleton or miscellany of brief pieces—frequently humorous, whimsical, or eccentric vignettes of life in New York—in a breezily light style, although latterly the section often begins with a serious commentary. For many years, newspaper snippets containing amusing errors, unintended meanings or badly mixed metaphors ("Block That Metaphor") have been used as filler items, accompanied by a witty retort. There is no masthead listing the editors and staff. Despite some changes, the magazine has kept much of its traditional appearance over the decades in typography, layout, covers and artwork. The magazine was acquired by Advance Publications, the media company owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr, in 1985, for $200 million when it was earning less than $6 million a year.

Ross was succeeded as editor by William Shawn (1951–87), followed by Robert Gottlieb (1987–92) and Tina Brown (1992–98). The current editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick, who succeeded Brown in July 1998.

Among the important nonfiction authors who began writing for the magazine during Shawn's editorship were Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Hannah Arendt, whose Eichmann in Jerusalem reportage appeared in the magazine, before it was published as a book.

Brown's tenure attracted more controversy than Gottlieb's or even Shawn's, thanks to her high profile (Shawn, by contrast, had been an extremely shy, introverted figure), and to the changes she made to a magazine with a similar look for the previous half-century. She introduced color to the editorial pages (several years before The New York Times) and included photography, with less type on each page and a generally more modern layout. More substantively, she increased the coverage of current events and topics such as celebrities and business tycoons, and placed short pieces throughout "Goings on About Town", including a racy column about nightlife in Manhattan. A letters-to-the-editor page was introduced, and authors' bylines were added to their "Talk of the Town" pieces.

Since the late 1990s, The New Yorker has used the Internet to publish current and archived material, and maintains a website with some content from the current issue (plus exclusive web-only content). Subscribers have access to the full current issue online and a complete archive of back issues viewable as they were originally printed. In addition, The New Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase online. A digital archive of back issues from 1925 to April 2008 (representing more than 4,000 issues and half a million pages) was also issued on DVD-ROMs and on a small portable hard drive. More recently, an iPad version of the current issue has been released.  In 2014, The New Yorker opened up access online to all of its archives, expanded its plans to run an ambitious Website, and launched a paywalled subscription model. “What we’re trying to do,” said Nicholas Thompson, the editor of the Website, “is to make a website that is to the Internet what the magazine is to all other magazines.”

The magazine's editorial staff unionized in 2018 and The New Yorker Union signed its first collective bargaining agreement in 2021.

The New Yorker influenced a number of similar magazines, including The Brooklynite (1926 to 1930), The Chicagoan (1926 to 1935), and Paris's The Boulevardier (1927 to 1932).

Cartoons - COMIC ART

The New Yorker has featured cartoons (usually gag cartoons) since it began publication in 1925. For years, its cartoon editor was Lee Lorenz, who first began cartooning in 1956 and became a New Yorker contract contributor in 1958. After serving as the magazine's art editor from 1973 to 1993 (when he was replaced by Françoise Mouly), he continued in the position of cartoon editor until 1998. His book The Art of the New Yorker: 1925–1995 (Knopf, 1995) was the first comprehensive survey of all aspects of the magazine's graphics. In 1998, Robert Mankoff took over as cartoon editor and edited at least 14 collections of New Yorker cartoons. Mankoff also usually contributed a short article to each book, describing some aspect of the cartooning process or the methods used to select cartoons for the magazine. He left the magazine in 2017.

The New Yorker's stable of cartoonists has included many important talents in American humor, including Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Charles Barsotti, George Booth, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Sam Cobean, Leo Cullum, Richard Decker, Pia Guerra, J. B. Handelsman, Helen E. Hokinson, Pete Holmes, Ed Koren, Reginald Marsh, Mary Petty, George Price, Charles Saxon, Burr Shafer, Otto Soglow, William Steig, Saul Steinberg, James Stevenson, James Thurber, and Gahan Wilson.

Many early New Yorker cartoonists did not caption their cartoons. In his book The Years with Ross, Thurber describes the newspaper's weekly art meeting, where cartoons submitted over the previous week were brought up from the mail room to be looked over by Ross, the editorial department, and a number of staff writers. Cartoons were often rejected or sent back to artists with requested amendments, while others were accepted and captions were written for them. Some artists hired their own writers; Helen Hokinson hired James Reid Parker in 1931. Brendan Gill relates in his book Here at The New Yorker that at one point in the early 1940s, the quality of the artwork submitted to the magazine seemed to improve. It later was found out that the office boy (a teenaged Truman Capote) had been acting as a volunteer art editor, dropping pieces he did not like down the far end of his desk.

Several of the magazine's cartoons have reached a higher plateau of fame. One 1928 cartoon drawn by Carl Rose and captioned by E. B. White shows a mother telling her daughter, "It's broccoli, dear." The daughter responds, "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it." The phrase "I say it's spinach" entered the vernacular, and three years later, the Broadway musical Face the Music included Irving Berlin's song "I Say It's Spinach (And the Hell with It)". The catchphrase "back to the drawing board" originated with the 1941 Peter Arno cartoon showing an engineer walking away from a crashed plane, saying, "Well, back to the old drawing board."

The most reprinted is Peter Steiner's 1993 drawing of two dogs at a computer, with one saying, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". According to Mankoff, Steiner and the magazine have split more than $100,000 in fees paid for the licensing and reprinting of this single cartoon, with more than half going to Steiner.

Over seven decades, many hardcover compilations of New Yorker cartoons have been published, and in 2004, Mankoff edited The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, a 656-page collection with 2,004 of the magazine's best cartoons published during 80 years, plus a double CD set with all 68,647 cartoons ever published in the magazine. This features a search function allowing readers to search for cartoons by cartoonist's name or year of publication. The newer group of cartoonists in recent years includes Pat Byrnes, J. C. Duffy, Liana Finck, Emily Flake, Robert Leighton, Michael Maslin, Julia Suits, and P. C. Vey. Will McPhail cited his beginnings as "just ripping off Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson, and doing little dot eyes." The notion that some New Yorker cartoons have punchlines so oblique as to be impenetrable became a subplot in the Seinfeld episode "The Cartoon", as well as a playful jab in The Simpsons episode "The Sweetest Apu".