Direct from Dogpatch: The life and comical career of Al Capp is (finally) told.

Al Capp created one of the most successful comic strips of all time: Li'l Abner. He was a cartoonist on a level never seen before or since—a major figure in the American culture, a White House confidante, with frequent appearances on America’s most popular TV talk shows—yet he had a dark side virtually unknown to the public.
That is about to change. Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary (Bloomsbury, $30) is the first major biography of the comics’ legend, fully illustrated with unprecedented access to Capp’s archives and a wealth of new material.
During the 43-year run of Li’l Abner (1934-1977), the Kentucky hillbilly residents of Capp’s fictional Dogpatch were regular fixtures at breakfast tables across America. The strip spawned two movies and a Broadway musical, originated such expressions as “hogwash,” “double-whammy” and “going bananas,” and introduced Sadie Hawkins Day. If not for L’il Abner, we might never have had Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad magazine, Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes or Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Capp mined the literary world of authors like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, while his highbrow satire within a strip about a lowbrow family served as a cultural, social and political commentary on the decades in which he wrote.
Though Li’l Abner brought millions joy, the man behind the strip was a complicated person. Overcoming the loss of a leg at an early age, Capp emerged during the Great Depression, earning a fortune as America’s best-known cartoonist. Li’l Abner ran in 900 newspapers with 90 million devoted readers. Capp’s personal celebrity transcended comics: he had a syndicated newspaper column and radio program, and oversaw a merchandise and amusement park empire. He made the covers of Newsweek, Time and Life and was received as a regular guest on The Tonight Show, charming the public with his curmudgeonly persona.
But a dark side emerged from the shadows. His apprenticeship with Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, started a -year feud that ended in Fisher’s suicide. Capp enjoyed outsized publicity for a cartoonist, but his status allowed him to get away with sexual misconduct and protected him from the severest repercussions for a good portion of his career. Late in life, his politics became extremely conservative; he counted Richard Nixon as a friend, and his gift for satire was redirected at targets such as John Lennon, Joan Baez and anti-war protesters on campuses across the country. In the early '70s, the longtime womanizer faced legal accusations of harassment after being publically exposed by conservative columnist Jack Anderson. Capp was charged and pled guilty in a single morals case. Virtually overnight his high profile career ended in disgrace.
This first major biography of Al Capp, a collaboration between authors Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen, creates an authoritative and provocative account of Capp’s life—and pays tribute to a strip that had a powerful cultural impact unlike any other strip in comics history.