I finally picked up Boris Dolgov by David Saunders. It is a biography and art portfolio of Boris Dolgov (1910-58), who did a couple of hundred interior story illustrations for the pulps, mainly Weird Tales, and a handful of Weird Tales covers. His first, from the November 1946 issue, is used as the cover for the volume. We also get a listing of all his artwork and reproductions of most of his artwork, as well as all his covers in color.
This book was published in both hardcover and paperback through Saunder’s own The Saunders Press in 2024. I have gotten many of his previous works from The Illustrated Press, so I hope we’ll see more from his own press. He also runs the Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists website.
We learn about his life, born as Ivan Ivanovich Dolgosheff in Ukraine to a Jewish family who later had to leave due to the Russian Civil War and World War I. The family eventually got to Hawaii, where Boris was sent to British Columbia and later to family in Connecticut.
There he learned artwork on his own and was lucky to meet Hannes Bok, who became a long-time friend. He adopted “Dolgoff,” later “Dolgov” as a pen name.
He also married a widow in New York. Strangely, he never became a U.S. citizen and may have been seen as an illegal alien despite his marriage. Sadly, they later divorced, and he struggled to find work as an artist in the late 1950s. His death in 1958 was apparently due to falling off the roof of his apartment building by accident while trying to get in because he had forgotten his keys.
His artwork is very interesting, and it’s sad that even during that time he wasn’t able to get more work as an illustrator. He only did six covers for Weird Tales, being one of several great artists who did Weird Tales covers in the later years of the magazine after Margaret Brundage stopped. This includes Hannes Bok, Lee Brown Coye, Matt Fox, Kelly Freas, Virgil Finlay, and others. Maybe if he had become more of a cartoonist, he might have gotten his work in more magazines, similar to the success of Charles Addams.
But this is a great volume, and I know Saunders did a lot of work tracking down Dolgov’s history, even contacting the family of his former wife. Whatever he does next I look forward to it.
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