Tony Auth Winner of 2nd Annual Herblock Prize

By: Dave Astor is a senior editor at E&P. Tony Auth of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Universal Press
Syndicate is the winner of the Herb Block Foundation's second annual Herblock Prize.

He'll receive the editorial-cartooning award -- which comes with a tax-free $10,000 -- during an April 6 ceremony at the Library of Congress. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is scheduled to deliver the 2005 Herblock Lecture at the event.

Last year's inaugural Herblock Prize winner, Matt Davies, said Auth's cartoons won because they "not only pointed out the flaws, ironies, and injustices in the system and its leaders, but simultaneously offered a playful sense of hope."

Davies -- a 2004 Pulitzer Prize recipient for the editorial cartoons he did for The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., and Tribune Media Services -- was one of three Herblock Prize judges. The other two were Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator of the Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library, and Harry Katz, former head curator of the prints and photos division of the Library of Congress.

Auth joined the Inquirer in 1971, and won the Pulitzer five years after.

The Herblock honor was announced by Frank Swoboda, president of the Herb Block Foundation. Herblock died in 2001 after a seven-decade cartooning career that included 55 years with The Washington Post.