Milt Gross wrote like he drew--funny. A son of New York Jewish immigrants, he was born in 1895 with a gift for the flawless mimicry and poetic elaboration of his parents' Bronx Yiddish dialect, which delighted his ears as he grew up drawing on every scrap of blank paper he could find in his second-floor apartment home. He was a "neturel hardest," as Gross-transcribed dialect would put it, but he was a "neturel rider" too. The combination is fundamental with the great comic-strip artists, such as George Herriman, Billy De Beck, Tad Dorgan, and others, for they work in a genre in which what is said by their characters is as important as how they look and perform, but it is rare for even so talented a writer and cartoonist as Gross to be simultaneously appreciated by two normally disparate audiences--that of the sophisticated book-reading world and that of...