Critic

The People

Steven Heller is a writer, lecturer, art director, and critic who cut his teeth in the underground newspaper scene in the late 1960's. At the age of 17, he walked into the office of The New York Free Press, trying to sell his cartoons, and ended up with a job "pasting up mechanicals.” Soon after, he was arrested in a pornography sting and told by his mob-related distributors that he was “the only person in New York who could make a sex paper fail." In 1974, he was called as a witness against Screw publisher Al Goldstein in a federal obscenity trial. By the age of 25, he was an art director at The New York Times, where he remained for over 30 years.