Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on June 25, 1874, Rose O╒Neill grew up in Battle Creek and Omaha, Nebraska, and was educated in convent schools. Although steered by her father toward a theatrical career, she preferred art. A prize drawing for the Omaha World-Herald when she was fourteen led to sales of other drawings to the newspaper and to the Great Divide magazine of Denver. In 1893 she made her way to New York City, where she was soon selling drawings to Truth, Puck, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines. In 1896 she married Gray Latham, a Virginia aristocrat whom she divorced in 1901. During the marriage she signed her work ╥O╒Neill Latham.╙ In June 1902 she married the editor of Puck, Harry Leon Wilson. She illustrated several of his books, including The Spenders, 1902, and The Lions of the Lord, 1903. They were divorced in 1907. In addition to her illustrations for Good Housekeeping, Life, Collier╒s, and other leading magazines, which brought her a substantial income, she wrote The Loves of Edwy, 1904, and The Lady in the White Veil, 1909.
Wealth came with O╒Neill╒s famous ╥Kewpies,╙ sentimental little Cupid figures to which the Ladies╒ Home Journal, under Edward Bok, devoted a full page in December 1909. The Kewpies and their adventures quickly became a national rage, and from drawing them she moved on to marketing a line of Kewpie dolls, patented in 1913. These modernized American Cupids swept the country, and royalties from their sales and from Kewpies and Dottie Darling, 1913, Kewpies: Their Book, Verse, and Poetry, 1913, Kewpie Kutouts, 1914, and Kewpies and the Runaway Baby, 1928, allowed O╒Neill all the leisure she required to paint in her Washington Square studio or at her villa on Capri, to entertain flamboyantly at Carabas Castle, her home in Westport, Connecticut, and to write poetry published as The Master-Mistress, 1922, and such extremely Gothic romances as Garda, 1929, and The Goblin Woman, 1930. Her serious drawings, exhibited at the Galerie Devambez in Paris in 1921, secured her election to the SociÄtÄ des Beaux Arts. She also dabbled in monumental sculpture. Late in life, her money squandered, she retired to ╥Bonnie Brook,╙ her family╒s homestead in the Ozark hills of Missouri. She died on April 6, 1944, in Springfield, Missouri.
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