My Greatest Ambition

Moses Lurie was born in 1938 to two Jewish emigrants from Poland, who named him after an uncle who died in Poland. Though born in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, he grew up, went to school, and worked in Melbourne. When Lurie was five years old, his father brought home American, full-color comic books that had been packed in with machinery. Though they were crumpled and greasy from his father’s factory, Lurie immediately fell in love with the stories and the comic book genre as a whole. As a child, Lurie would often lie to his parents or steal from his mother for money to buy more comics. Despite his dream to become a comic book artist himself, Lurie studied architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and went on to work in advertising. After working in advertising through the 1960s, Lurie began his writing career when he published his first book, Rappaport, in 1966. As a writer, Lurie traveled broadly, visiting Greece, England, New York, Morrocco, and more. His travels as well as his isolating identity as the child of emigrants informed much of his writing, and his characters often share his identity and experiences. Lurie wrote across many genres, though he is most famous for his short stories, which have been published in magazines around the world. Throughout his career, he composed over 20 novels and short story collections. In 2014, Lurie died of cancer in Melbourne, a month after publishing his final short story collection, Hergesheimer in the Present Tense.

Comic books have been around since the late 1800s, but after the Great Depression ended in the late 1930s, they grew in popularity. Specifically, the launch of the Superman comics in 1938 solidified the comic book genre in popular culture. During World War II, comic books became even more popular due to their inspiring yet affordable stories. They often featured heroes triumphantly overcoming evil, which was a comforting theme amidst the horrors of WWII. Around this time, in the 1940s, the most popular comic books such as Superman and Batman sold around 1.5 million copies per month. Magazines also centered their issues around comics. Though they would also include short stories to supplement their content, most comic magazines featured regular characters that would keep readers returning issue after issue. One such magazine, Boy Magazine, launched in October 1952 and catered to young Australian readers. Boy was advertised as a comic magazine, with comic strips filling most of its pages. Despite the magazine’s success, it soon had to scale back its full-color, low-priced issues. Prices steadily increased and editors began using fewer colors to lower printing costs. Even so, in October 1955, Boy announced it would suspend production.

Morris Lurie’s autobiographical impulse extends beyond short stories like “My Greatest Ambition,” including his most famous novel, Rappaport, which follows a day in the life of a young man living and working in Melbourne, where Lurie himself grew up. However, while Lurie gave up his dream of becoming a comic strip artist, other writers have combined the comic book and autobiography genres to produce autobiographical graphic novels. Most famously, in 2007, Alison Bechdel published Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which follows Bechdel’s coming of age and her relationship with her father. Through the comic form, Bechdel highlights the complexity of her lesbian identity as well as her father’s gay identity, which he hid during her childhood. Later that same year, in 2007, Marjane Satrapi published Persepolis, which tells the story of her childhood amidst the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, Iran, and her adolescence living in Vienna as a displaced teenager. Like Bechdel, Satrapi uses the graphic novel to share her complex feelings as a young person enduring political upheaval and separation from her family, while also growing to understand her identity as a young Muslim woman.