Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York

by Steven Heller

An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times . Featuring 100 color photographs, Growing Up Underground takes readers on a visually inspired look back on being at the center of New York's youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s.
 
Steven Heller's memoir is no chronological trek through the hills and valleys of his comparatively "normal" life, but instead, a coming-of-age tale whereby, with luck and circumstance, he found himself in curious and remarkable places at critical times during the 1960s and ‘70s in New York City.
 
Heller's delightful account of his life between the ages of 16 and 26 shows his ambitious journey from the start of his illustrious career as a graphic designer, cartoonist, and writer. Follow his journey through stints at the New York Review of Sex, Screw, and the New York Free Press, until he became the youngest art director (and occasional illustrator) for the New York Times Op-Ed page at age twenty-three.

Genres: Design, Memoir, Nonfiction, History, American

224 pages, Paperback

Published October 4, 2022

About the author

Steven Heller writes a monthly column on graphic design books for The New York Times Book Review and is co-chair of MFA Design at the School of Visual Arts. He has written more than 100 books on graphic design, illustration and political art, including Paul Rand, Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century, Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design Second Edition, Handwritten: Expressive Lettering in the Digital Age, Graphic Design History, Citizen Designer, Seymour Chwast: The Left Handed Designer, The Push Pin Graphic: Twenty Five Years of Design and Illustration, Stylepedia: A Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits, The Anatomy of Design: Uncovering the Influences and Inspirations in Modern Graphic Design. He edits VOICE: The AIGA Online Journal of Graphic Design, and writes for Baseline, Design Observer, Eye, Grafik, I.D., Metropolis, Print, and Step. Steven is the recipient of the Art Directors Club Special Educators Award, the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and the School of Visual Arts' Masters Series Award.

Reviews

[Sarah Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating park into the small, underground magazine work of the 1970s. A gritty slice of New York, peppered with a handful celebrities passing through. The way of magazine covers, illustrations, and spreads of these old publications were really inspiring, and showed so much lively, youthful energy.

Heller said that every designer needs a Dada phase, where they can mess around and break all the rules. It’s wild to me grow young he was when he started doing pasteboard layouts, just 16 and 17 years old.

While I liked the stories, imagery, and scenes Heller painted, I wanted more of an arc, and not just fragmented memories. Even commentary or connections to how this world of printing just isn’t the same today.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Renowned art director (New York Free Press, Screw, NY Times Op Ed, NYTBR), lifelong New Yorker, father of @newyorknico, husband to design legend Louise Fili, Steven Heller has a lot of stories, a few of which he tells in engaging fashion in the coming-of-age memoir (the book ends when he joins the Times at 23) that also serves as a mini-history of the city's once-vibrant underground newspaper scene in the 1960s and early 1970s. LOTS of illustrations uh, illustrate Heller's uh, illustration tales, and a loose structure and breezy style add to the pleasure.