Marlette, Doug

▪ 2008

Douglas N. Marlette 

      American cartoonist and comic-strip artist

born Dec. 6, 1949, Greensboro, N.C.

died July 10, 2007, near Holly Springs, Miss.

was an edgy editorial cartoonist who in 1988 won a Pulitzer Prize for a series for the Charlotte Observer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution on fundamentalist religion and politics. During his 35-year career, he also worked at Newsday, the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat, and, most recently, the Tulsa (Okla.) World. In addition to his cartoons, which skewered subjects ranging from the pope to former U.S. president Bill Clinton and evangelist Jerry Falwell (Falwell, Jerry Laymon, Sr. ) (q.v.), Marlette penned a comic strip he called Kudzu, named after the twisted vine that became invasive in the U.S. South. Kudzu, which premiered in 1981, featured a cast of characters (Kudzu Dubose, the Rev. Will B. Dunn, Uncle Dub, and others) who mimicked stereotypes of rural Southerners. In the 1990s he adapted the strip to a Broadway-style musical. Marlette also was the author of two novels, The Bridge (2001) and Magic Time (2006). He was a graduate (1971) of Florida State University and the first cartoonist to study as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University.

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