Alison Bechdel
Biography
Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist born on September 10, 1960, in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Beech Creek, where both parents taught English literature and her father ran a part-time funeral home that the family nicknamed the "fun home." She earned a BA from Oberlin College in 1981.
In 1983, Bechdel began writing and drawing the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran in gay and alternative newspapers across the United States for 25 years. A 1985 strip from the series introduced what became known as the Bechdel test, a widely referenced framework for evaluating gender representation in fiction. The strip's success allowed her to become a full-time cartoonist by 1990.
Her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home chronicled her childhood and her complex relationship with her closeted father. It became a bestseller and was adapted into a musical that won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. Her second memoir, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, was published in 2012. Bechdel received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014.
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