Milton Caniff will be best remembered as the creator of the comic strips Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. These adventure strips, marked by their superior artwork and exciting stories, enjoyed a daily audience of some thirty million readers. A New York Times obituary writer explained that "Caniff's art was credited with bringing a new level of realism to cartoon drawing." A Newsweek reviewer once described Caniff as "the most widely aped artisan" in the comic strip field. "When the definitive history of the comics is finally written," Art Wood proclaimed in Great Cartoonists and Their Art, "standing at the head of the line exchanging a brush for Father Time's quill pen will be a genial genius among comic artists, Milton A. Caniff."

"Caniff," Lynn Hoogenboom recounted in the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, "was the only child of John William Caniff, a printer, and Elizabeth Burton...