Richard Edes Harrison was one of the renowned cartographers of the 1940s. He was a Yale architecture graduate, whose new techniques and theory created novel standards in the field of cartography. Richard Edes Harrison published his first map in 1932 in the Time magazine. He worked as a freelance artist, a cartographic consultant and a staff member of various national magazines. He was also a visiting lecturer in many universities.
Richard Edes Harrison was a gifted illustrator and his maps maintained an artistic dimension. Richard Edes Harrison is known to combine geography, geometry and imagination in his maps. The motive behind the creation of the maps was to serve the map readers and help them understand the political and geographical situations.
It was in 1940 that his work came to be acknowledged. In the same year, Richard Edes Harrison is known to have created maps for Fortune magazine. In these maps he modified the bird’s eye view format to a global setting. The best of his maps were published as ‘Look at the World: The Fortune Atlas for World Strategy’ in 1944.