Who Was Charles Addams?...

Director Alfred Hitchcock once made a pilgrimage to Addams’ front door, just to catch a glimpse of him in his natural habitat. Popular lore had it that the cartoonist was a regular patient at New York State sanitariums, and that he preferred his martinis garnished with eyeballs. And while many of the stories about Addams were exaggerated, there’s no doubt he had a penchant for the peculiar. Instead of a standard coffee table, Addams used a Civil War-era embalming table. He also kept a collection of antique crossbows above his sofa. With quirks like that, you wouldn’t guess that the artist had such a normal upbringing. Charles Addams was born January 7, 1912, in Westfield, New Jersey, the only child of a piano salesman. He was a smiling baby who grew into a smiling boy, loved indulgently by his parents and well liked by his friends and classmates. “I know it would be more interesting, perhaps, if I had a ghastly childhood—chained to an iron beam and thrown a can of Alpo every day,” Addams once told an interviewer. “I’m one of those strange people who actually had a happy childhood.” ~ From "Mental Floss". >>> Origins and The New Yorker cartoons (1933–1964)

>>> Charles Addams began as a cartoonist in The New Yorker with a sketch of a window washer that ran on February 6, 1932.

But, of course, then there's THEM!!! >>>

Addams first drew the then-unnamed Morticia some years before her first published appearance in The New Yorker. Some sources give a date of 1933, while Addams himself when asked in interview suggested "around 1937." Media speculation at the time often connected Morticia to Charles Addams' first wife Barbara Jean Day, but he had yet to meet her. In an interview in 1981 he acknowledged that Morticia reflected the qualities he was attracted to. Because of this, the women he married later on resembled the character. He described Morticia as "not patterned after anyone in particular, although I’ve often thought there was a little Gloria Swanson in her."

The first Addams Family cartoon was published in 1938, in a one-panel gag format. Charles Addams became a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and drew approximately 1,300 cartoons between then and his death in 1988. 58 of these would feature the Addams Family, almost all of which were published in the 1940s and 1950s. Members of the family were introduced one by one, with Morticia first, Gomez (based on Thomas E. Dewey) joining four years later, Pugsley, and finally Wednesday and Fester shortly after. Addams indicated that Fester resembled himself, "plus a little more hair." A Christmas 1946 strip, showing the family pouring boiling oil on carolers, was well received and was later sold on Christmas cards.

Outside of The New Yorker, Addams also published several collections, the most notable being Dear Dead Days: A Family Album in 1959.

~ Wikpedia.