“The war became very real to me… I really sobered up and started realizing there were some things bigger than me and my ambitions,” Mauldin wrote. He even nearly died during a mortar attack, earning a Purple Star Heart. Mauldin managed to secure a spot cartooning for ]], which made him safer than most “dog faces.” But he still ventured to the front lines in Italy and elsewhere, fastidiously documenting the war from a grunt’s perspective.

And, soon enough, followed him over the Atlantic into the hell of World War II. Using Mauldin’s writings, interviews and those cartoons, DePastino follows the young, driven man as he developed as a person and illustrator. From the start, his work focused on the lives of the grunts, who trudged through mud and faced the disrespect of superiors. With no other options (like many other enlistees), Mauldin signed up for the army and started cartooning for a service newsletter. In his teens, he went to Chicago to study, but despite a prodigious output he had little success landing his cartoons. Mauldin was a deeply conflicted man, DePastino finds, alternatively successful and unhappy because of his deep drive for acceptance.īorn in 1921 to a rough and tumble family, Mauldin had little going for him as a child besides an aptitude for art. In his new biography, Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, author Todd DePastino takes that famous life and digs out all the strange truths, the contradictions, the unknown motivations. Urn:oclc:25465126 Republisher_date 20150507012415 Republisher_operator Scandate 20150425012505 Scanner many ways, Bill Mauldin lived out the American Dream, starting out as a physically unimposing ‘desert rat’ in the southwest, then joining the army and becoming a star soldier-cartoonist, and retiring as one of the best known editorial cartoonists in the country. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 14:56:16 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA1130816 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorīostonpubliclibrary Edition 50th anniversary ed.

Up front by bill mauldin