Mauldin, William Henry

▪ 2004

“Bill” 

      American cartoonist (b. Oct. 29, 1921, Mountain Park, N.M.—d. Jan. 22, 2003, Newport Beach, Calif.), created Willie and Joe—two “everyman” dogfaces whose weary struggles against incompetent officers in addition to battles against the enemy made them inspiring symbols—and through them captured the reality of war and the way the infantrymen on the World War II battlefields experienced it; in 1945 these depictions won Mauldin the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes. Later, as a widely syndicated cartoonist, he turned to more general national and international political and social commentary, eloquently skewering bigotry and pomposity and expressing the emotion of historic events. Among his most memorable cartoons was one that appeared in 1963 after the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy; it depicted a grieving statue of Abraham Lincoln at Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Memorial. Mauldin studied cartooning through a correspondence course and at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and began having some of his drawings published. The National Guard unit he had joined was federalized in 1940, and while undergoing army training he drew cartoons for military publications. Upon shipping out to Europe, he also began providing them for the army newspaper Stars and Stripes; in 1945 a number of those were included in his best-seller Up Front. After the war Mauldin concentrated on writing and on working in the motion picture business for a while, acting in the 1951 films Red Badge of Courage and Teresa, but in 1958 returned to cartooning for the St. Louis (Mo.) Post-Dispatch. The following year he won his second Pulitzer, for a cartoon depicting the U.S.S.R.'s persecution of writer Boris Pasternak. Mauldin moved to the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962 and remained there until his retirement in 1991.

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