Van Jensen talks with Willie & Joe editor and Bill Mauldin biographer Todd DePastino about the famous cartoonist
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PWCW: How surprised were you that no previous biographies had been written on Mauldin?
TD: Plenty of editors pointed out what I myself saw as a narrative problem. The story seemed to peak so early, when Mauldin was 23 years old. He had another 58 years to live after that. But I kept finding out fascinating turns in his life story—his Hollywood experiences, his civil rights activism, his run for Congress, his trips to Korea and Vietnam, his celebrated return to cartooning after a 10-year hiatus. I also discovered that his postwar cartoons were often just as insightful and compelling as his wartime work, so the reasons for not writing a full-scale biography kept falling away.In the end, I was left with the realization that one of the most important artists of the 20th century had no biography.
