Edward Sorel is an award-winning cartoonist who has produced many of The Nation's most memorable covers. He is also a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, for which he has done forty-one covers. His art has appeared on the covers of The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Fortune, Forbes, Esquire, American Heritage and The New York Times Magazine. He has illustrated many children's books, three of which he also wrote. Unauthorized Portraits (Knopf, 1997) is the most recent of several collections of his work.

In 1998 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, devoted several rooms to an exhibition of his caricatures. Other one-man shows include the Graham Gallery and the Davis and Langdale Gallery in New York City, the Susan Conway Gallery in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Boston, and Galerie Bartsch & Chariau in Munich, Germany. He is a recipient of the Augustus St. Gaudens Medal for Professional Achievement from The Cooper Union, the Hamilton King Award from The Society of Illustrators, the Page One Award from the Newspaper Guild, the Best in Illustration Award from the National Cartoonists Society, the George Polk Award for Satiric Drawing, and the "Karikaturpreis der deutschen Anwaltschaft" from the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, Germany. In 2001 the Art Directors Club of New York elected him to their Hall of Fame, the first cartoonist since John Held Jr. to be so honored.