Mauldin, one of the 20th century's preeminent editorial cartoonists, struck gold early with Willie and Joe, his mud-encrusted, unshaven cartoon dogfaces who, slogging their way across Europe during World War II, dodged German bullets while lampooning Army life. Mauldin was a 21-year-old rifleman when Willie and Joe started appearing in Stars and Stripes and in 1945, only 23, he won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning. He won his second in 1959 while working at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for depicting Soviet novelist Boris Pasternak saying to another gulag prisoner: "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?" Mauldin joined the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962.
Passage: Bill Mauldin, 81
Mauldin, one of the 20th century's preeminent editorial cartoonists, struck gold early with Willie and Joe, his mud-encrusted, unshaven cartoon dogfaces who, slogging their way across Europe during World War II, dodged German bullets while lampooning Army life. Mauldin was a 21-year-old rifleman when Willie and Joe started appearing in Stars and Stripes and in 1945, only 23, he won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning. He won his second in 1959 while working at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for depicting Soviet novelist Boris Pasternak saying to another gulag prisoner: "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?" Mauldin joined the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962.
