Life of Lee

Early Life

Stanley Martin Lieber was born on December 28, 1922, in Manhattan, New York City, in the apartment of his Romanian-born Jewish immigrant parents, Celia (née Solomon: 1898-1947) and Jack Lieber (1893-1965), at the corner of West 98th Street and West End Avenue in Manhattan. His father, trained as a dress cutter, worked only sporadically after the Great Depression, and the family moved further uptown to Fort Washington Avenue, in Washington Heights, Manhattan. Lee had one younger brother named Larry Lieber. He said in 2006 that as a child he was influenced by books and movies, particularly those with Errol Flynn playing heroic roles. By the time Lee was in his teens, the family was living in an apartment at 1720 University Avenue in The Bronx. Lee described it as "a third-floor apartment facing out back". Lee and his brother shared the bedroom, while their parents slept on a foldout couch.
Lee attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. In his youth, Lee enjoyed writing and entertained dreams of writing the "Great American Novel" one day. He said that in his youth he worked such part-time jobs as writing obituaries for a news service and press releases for the National Tuberculosis Centre; delivering sandwiches for the Jack May pharmacy to offices in Rockefeller Centre; working as an office boy for a trouser manufacturer; ushering at the Rivoli Theatre on Broadway; and selling subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. At fifteen, Lee entered a high school essay competition sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune, called "The Biggest News of the Week Contest." Lee claimed to have won the prize for three straight weeks, goading the newspaper to write him and ask him to let someone else win. The paper suggested he look into writing professionally, which Lee claimed, "probably changed my life." He graduated from high school early, aged sixteen and a half, in 1939 and joined the WPA Federal Theatre Project.

Source

Early Career

With the help of his uncle Robbie Solomon, Lee became an assistant in 1939 at the new Timely Comics division of pulp magazine and comic-book publisher Martin Goodman's company. Timely, by the 1960s, would evolve into Marvel Comics. Lee, whose cousin Jean was Goodman's wife, was formally hired by Timely editor Joe Simon. His duties were prosaic at first. "In those days [the artists] dipped the pen in ink, I had to make sure the inkwells were filled", Lee recalled in 2009. "I went down and got them their lunch, I did proof-reading, I erased the pencils from the finished pages for them". Marshaling his childhood ambition to be a writer, young Stanley Lieber made his comic-book debut with the text filler "Captain America Foils the Traitor's Revenge" in Captain America Comics #3 (cover-dated May 1941), using the pseudonym Stan Lee, which years later he would adopt as his legal name. Lee later explained in his autobiography and numerous other sources that because of the low social status of comic books, he was so embarrassed that he used a pen name so that nobody would associate his real name with comics when he someday wrote the Great American Novel. This initial story also introduced Captain America's trademark ricocheting shield-toss. He graduated from writing filler to actual comics with a backup feature, "'Headline' Hunter, Foreign Correspondent", two issues later.
Lee's first superhero co-creation was the Destroyer, in Mystic Comics #6 (August 1941). Other characters he co-created during this period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books include Jack Frost, debuting in U.S.A. Comics #1 (August 1941), and Father Time, debuting in Captain America Comics #6 (August 1941). When Simon and his creative partner Jack Kirby left late in 1941, following a dispute with Goodman, the 30-year-old publisher installed Lee, just under 19 years old, as interim editor. The youngster showed a knack for the business that led him to remain as the comic-book division's editor-in-chief, as well as art director for much of that time, until 1972, when he would succeed Goodman as publisher. Lee entered the United States Army in early 1942 and served within the US as a member of the Signal Corps, repairing telegraph poles and other communications equipment. He was later transferred to the Training Film Division, where he worked writing manuals, training films, slogans, and occasionally cartooning. His military classification, he said, was "playwright"; he added that only nine men in the U.S. Army were given that title. In the Army, Lee's division included many famous or soon-to-be famous people, including three-time Academy Award-winning director Frank Capra, New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams, and children's book writer and illustrator Theodore Geisel, known to the world as "Dr. Seuss." Vincent Fago, editor of Timely's "animation comics" section, which put out humour and funny animal comics, filled in until Lee returned from his World War II military service in 1945.

Source

Comic Creations

Stan lee majorly worked for both Marvel and DC Comics. In collaboration with others at Marvel—particularly co-writer/artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko—he co-created numerous popular fictional characters, including superheroes Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch and Ant-Man. In doing so, he pioneered a more naturalistic approach to writing superhero comics in the 1960s, and in the 1970s he challenged the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, indirectly leading to changes in its policies. In the 1980s he pursued development of Marvel properties in other media, with mixed results. Following his retirement from Marvel in the 1990s, he remained a public figurehead for the company, and frequently made cameo appearances in films based on Marvel characters, on which he received an honorary "executive producer" credit. Meanwhile, he continued independent creative ventures into his 90s, until his death in 2018.

Source

Personal Life

Lee was raised in a Jewish family. In a 2002 survey of whether he believed in God, he stated, "Well, let me put it this way... No, I'm not going to try to be clever. I really don't know. I just don't know." From 1945 to 1947, Lee lived in the rented top floor of a brownstone in the East 90s in Manhattan. He married Joan Clayton Boocock, originally from Newcastle, England, on December 5, 1947, and in 1949, the couple bought a house in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island, living there through 1952. Their daughter Joan Celia "J. C." Lee was born in 1950. Another daughter, Jan Lee, died three days after delivery in 1953. The Lees resided in the Long Island town of Hewlett Harbor, New York, from 1952 to 1980. They also owned a condominium on East 63rd Street in Manhattan from 1975 to 1980, and during the 1970s owned a vacation home in Remsenburg, New York. For their move to the West Coast in 1981, they bought a home in West Hollywood, California, previously owned by comedian Jack Benny's radio announcer Don Wilson. On July 6, 2017, his wife of 69 years, Joan, died of complications from a stroke. She was 95 years old. Lee died at the age of 95 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, on November 12, 2018, after being rushed there in a medical emergency earlier in the day. Earlier that year, Lee revealed to the public that he had been battling pneumonia and in February was rushed to the hospital for worsening conditions at around the same time. The immediate cause of death listed on his death certificate was cardiac arrest with respiratory failure and congestive heart failure as underlying causes. It also indicated that he suffered from "aspiration pneumonia."

Source

Accolades

The County of Los Angeles and the City of Long Beach declared October 2, 2009, "Stan Lee Day".
On July 14, 2017, Lee and Jack Kirby were named Disney Legends for their creation of numerous characters that later comprised Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe.
On July 18, 2017, as part of D23 Disney Legends event, a ceremony was held at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard where Stan Lee imprinted his hands, feet, and signature in cement.