John Fischetti was born in Brooklyn on September 27, 1916 and died in Chicago on November 18, 1980. After graduating from Pratt Technical Institute, he went to work for Disney Studios in California as an animator and later moved to Chicago, Illinois where he was an illustrator for the Chicago Sun newspaper (now Chicago Sun-Times). He entered the U.S. Army in 1942 where he cartooned for Stars & Stripes newspaper; he also moonlighted at the Paris Post. After his return from Europe in 1946, he went to New York to do freelance work for advertising agencies and magazines.

Between 1951 and 1962, he worked with the Newspaper Enterprise Association in New York as an editorial artist. In 1962, Fischetti joined the New York Herald Tribune where he popularized the horizontal cartoon format with grey tones, now a standard of the field. With the demise of the New York Herald Tribune in 1967, Fischetti returned to Chicago, Illinois to work as a political cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News. When that paper folded in 1978, he worked for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Fischetti was the recipient of the National Headliners Club medal in 1951, two awards from Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists in 1956 and 1958, and four consecutive awards from the National Cartoonists Society from 1962 thorough 1965. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for the body of cartoons he drew in 1968. By the time he died in 1980, his cartoons had appeared in publications such as the Chicago Sun, Chicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, and Stars & Stripes. He also illustrated several books, a number of them for children, and his non-editorial work appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's magazine, Woman's Home Companion, Cosmopolitan, and Punch magazine.