Harry Devlin was born in Jersey City, New Jersey.  In 1935, he entered Syracuse University to major in illustration, despite his family's encouragement of a career in medicine.  In Devlin's senior year he met Dorothy Wende, a junior from Buffalo, New York majoring in Fine Arts.  Dorothy is a portrait and still life painter, poet and children's book author.  In 1939, Harry graduated from Syracuse and moved to a studio in New York City, starting his career primarily in magazine illustration.  Harry and Dorothy married in 1941 and moved to Mountainside, New Jersey in 1950, where they raised their seven children.

In World War II he served in the U.S. Navy and was assigned to the Identification and Characteristics Office of Naval Intelligence, where he was responsible for all illustrations and technical drawings published in manuals that were used by U.S. fliers to identify enemy planes.  By 1945, Devlin had risen to the rank of lieutenant and illustrated all Japanese, German, and Italian aircraft.

After the war he began a ten-year association with Collier's Weekly.  He created editorial cartoons and illustrations for the magazine’s advertisements and articles.  His work also appeared in other publications including the Saturday Home Magazine and the New York Daily News.  During the McCarthy era, he was fired from these publications after refusing to design a pro-McCarthy cartoon.

During the 1950s, Devlin developed a comic strip carried in local papers like the Newark Evening News and the Elizabeth Daily Journal, and was syndicated in newspapers as far west as Honolulu.  He also began painting portraits and Victorian architecture and produced more than two dozen children's books in collaboration with his wife.  The first of these children’s books was Old Black Witch (1963), a story with  two sequels to follow. 

Devlin renewed a long-standing interest in Victorian architecture and published To Grandfather's House We Go (1967), containing illustrations after paintings he had begun as early as 1954.  The clarity of the descriptions and illustrations of architecture made the work not only an educational children's book but also a source book for college courses in architectural history.  Devlin published What Kind of a House Is That? shortly after, and in 1989 produced his major volume on the subject, Portraits of American Architecture: Monuments to a Romantic Mood, 1830-1900.

Devlin employs a technique very similar to contemporary photo-realism by altering slide images to define his basic composition and removing symbols of modern life such as telephone poles to create a sense of nostalgia.  Today, Devlin's works can be found in several New Jersey private, corporate, and museum collections including the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum and the Morris Museum of Art.

Devlin won the Advertising Illustration Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 1962 and 1963.  Christmas, Dec. 2008, ABC Family animated one of his children’s books, the Cranberry Christmas, for national TV with original songs by Barry Manilow. 

Sources:
Wikipedia
Reference and additional information courtesy of Jonathan Kasso