(
The definitive biography of the greatest cartoonist of ...)
The definitive biography of the greatest cartoonist of the Greatest Generation.
"The real war," said Walt Whitman, "will never get in the books." During World War II, the truest glimpse most Americans got of the "real war" came through the flashing black lines of twenty-two-year-old infantry sergeant Bill Mauldin. Week after week, Mauldin defied army censors, German artillery, and Patton's pledge to "throw his ass in jail" to deliver his wildly popular cartoon, "Up Front," to the pages of Stars and Stripes. "Up Front" featured the wise-cracking Willie and Joe, whose stooped shoulders, mud-soaked uniforms, and pidgin of army slang and slum dialect bore eloquent witness to the world of combat and the men who lived?and died?in it.This taut, lushly illustrated biography?the first of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bill Mauldin?is illustrated with more than ninety classic Mauldin cartoons and rare photographs. It traces the improbable career and tumultuous private life of a charismatic genius who rose to fame on his motto: "If it's big, hit it." 92 illustrations
(
The definitive collection of the complete WWII cartoons...)
The definitive collection of the complete WWII cartoons of the greatest cartoonist of the Greatest Generation, now in paperback.
During WW II, the closest most Americans ever came to combat was through the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, the most beloved enlisted man in the U.S. Army.
This new paperback edition of the 2008 two-volume, deluxe hardcover set brings together Mauldin’s complete works from 1940 through the end of the war under one cover. This collection of over 600 cartoons, most never before reprinted, is more than the record of a great artist: it is an essential chronicle of America’s citizen-soldiers from peace through war to victory.
Bill Mauldin knew war because he was in it. He had created his characters, Willie and Joe, at age 18, before Pearl Harbor, while training with the 45th Infantry Division and cartooning part-time for the camp newspaper. His brilliant send-ups of officers were pure infantry, and the men loved it. Mauldin’s cartoons and captions recreated on paper the fully realized world of the American combat soldier.
Willie & Joe is edited by Todd DePastino, Mauldin’s official biographer. Willie & Joe contains an introduction and running commentary by DePastino, providing context for the drawings, pertinent biographical details of Mauldin’s life, and occasional background on specific cartoons (such as the ones that made Patton howl). 704 pages of black-and-white cartoons
William Henry "Bill" Mauldin was an American incomparable cartoon biographer, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Background
Bill Mauldin was born on October 29, 1921, in Mountain Park, New Mexico. He was a son of Sidney Albert and Edith Katrina (Bemis). A scrawny boy, often confined to bed by rickets, he expressed his daydreams in drawings of himself as a cowboy or other heroic figure.
Education
He attended public schools in New Mexico and Arizona, depending upon where his father happened to be unemployed. While in high school, Mauldin took a correspondence course in cartooning. In 1939 he studied cartooning at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
Career
Mauldin worked in Phoenix, drawing gag cartoons for Arizona Highways. In September 1940 he enlisted in the Arizona National Guard, which five days later was federalized. A member of the U. S. Army's 45th Division, Mauldin went overseas in 1943 to Sicily, where he joined the Mediterranean edition of Stars and Stripes, the Army's wartime newspaper. Mauldin covered the fighting in Sicily, Salerno, Monte Cassino, and Anzio and then in France and Germany. He was wounded at Salerno and received the Purple Heart.
Mauldin's cartoons for Stars and Stripes pictured the ordinary, unheroic GIs, wearily slogging on, getting a job done, and wanting to go home. Like Ernie Pyle's prose, they vividly portrayed what GI life was really like and intimately expressed the Gl's hopes and dreams, fears and hardships. For many Americans, Mauldin's combat-weary team of Willie and Joe became the archetypical GIs of the war in Europe. Disenchanted yet dignified, dirty and bearded, the battle-hardened Willie and Joe were more interested in dry socks than in the lofty rhetoric of war aims, and they hated officers almost as much as they hated the war.
While most of the Army hierarchy approved of Mauldin's cartoons as a healthy outlet for the average conscript's emotions, some officers-particularly Gen. George S. Patton-objected to the grimy, realistic public image Willie and Joe were projecting of the U. S. Army. Nevertheless, Mauldin's melancholy pen-and-ink commentaries on Gl life were brought together in several published collections, including Star Spangled Banter (1941 and 1944), Mud, Mules and Mountains (1944), and Up Front (1945), which earned Mauldin a 1945 Pulitzer Prize.
Released from the army in June 1945, Mauldin went to work for United Features Syndicate, which distributed his cartoon strips to more than 180 newspapers in the United States under the evolving titles "Sweating It Out, " "Back Home, " and "Willie and Joe. " Although his first postwar collection, Back Home, won critical acclaim, the angry, bitter tone of Mauldin's liberal cartoons soon led him to be dropped by one newspaper after another.
In 1950 he went to Hollywood to try his hand as an actor and technical advisor in several films, and early in 1952 he went to the war front in Korea. His report of the experience was published as Bill Mauldin in Korea (1952).
Mauldin joined the staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as editorial cartoonist in 1958 and won another Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons the next year. His wry satires on the politics of Eisenhower's last years in the presidency were collected in What's Got Your Back Up? (1961). I've Decided I Want My Seat Back (1965) summed up his liberal commentaries on the desegregation struggles of the early 1960.
In June 1962 Mauldin moved to the Chicago Sun-Times, where his editorial cartoons were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers. Continuing "to buck power, " as he put it, to satirize the high and mighty, Mauldin earned the reputation as a worthy successor to Herblock, the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post. His books included The Brass Ring (1971) and Mud and Guts (1978). An avid flying buff, Mauldin described his air experiences in articles for Sports Illustrated.
Mauldin's work was part of an exhibit at the National Archives in Washington, D. C. in 1992. The exhibit, called "Draw! Political Cartoons From Left to Right, " featured Mauldin and five other prominent political cartoonists. A fiftieth-anniversary edition of his classic Up Front was published in 1995.
(
The definitive biography of the greatest cartoonist of ...)
Politics
In 1956 he ran as a Democrat for Congress in New York's heavily Republican 28th Congressional District and was easily trounced by the incumbent, Katherine St. George.
Connections
Married three times, he was survived by seven children. (His daughter Kaja had died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2001. )