William Auerbach-Levy, painter, printmaker, and caricaturist, was born William Auerbach in Brest-Litovsk, Russian Empire, on February 14, 1889. His parents added Levy to their last name when they emigrated to the United States in 1894. Auerbach-Levy studied at the School of the National Academy of Design in New York and the Académie Julian in Paris with Jean Paul Laurens. He later taught at the Educational Alliance Art School and the School of the National Academy of Design, both in New York.

Auerbach-Levy gained notoriety as a caricaturist and he was considered one of the finest exponents of the art. His caricatures of prominent people appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Post, Colliers, Esquire, and American Heritage.

In 1926, he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design and a full Academician in 1958, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1929. Auerbach-Levy was also a member of and exhibited with the Chicago Society of Etchers, the Society of American Graphic Artists, and the Salmagundi Club. His prints were selected for "Fifty Prints of the Year" in 1931 and 1933. He was awarded a prize from the National Academy of Design in 1921 and 1925, and the Samuel F. B. Morse gold medal in 1958. He also won the Isaac N. Maynard Prize for portraiture in 1925, the Isidor Prize from the Salmagundi Club, and the Lewis First Prize for Caricature from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1927.

The work of Auerbach-Levy is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts; the Library of Congress and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the New York Public Library; and the Worcester Art Museum.

William Auerbach-Levy died in Ossining, New York on June 29, 1964.