Little Orphan Annie, America's most popular hapless waif for over three score and ten years, first showed up in U.S. newspaper comic sections in 1924. The brainchild of cartoonist Harold Gray, Annie was inspired in part by the sort of feisty orphans America's Sweetheart Mary Pickford had been playing on silent movie screens for over a decade as well as by the pluck-and-luck lads Horatio Alger, Jr.had introduced in his novels in the previous century. The conservative and eccentric Gray sent his redheaded, blank-eyed, little orphan on a relentless odyssey through America, commencing in the Roaring Twenties, continuing through the Great Depression of the 1930s, into the grim years of World War II, through the Cold War, and into the restless 1960s. Along the way he created scores of memorable characters, all drawn in his bleak, shadowy, and highly individual cartoon style. Chief...