Editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose bedraggled “Willie and Joe” characters famously represented the lowly “dogface” foot soldiers of World War II, won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first when he was only 23.
For those who actually don’t know, the show will be a strong introduction. And for those who only remember him for Willie and Joe, it’ll be a reminder that he went on to have a near 50-year, nationally syndicated career that spoke truth to power and championed every kind of “little guy” in the face of injustice.
Mauldin led a frenetic, often troubled personal life that included three wives, two divorces, and eight children. (This exhibit might send you, as it did me, to his books or to Todd DePastino’s biography, Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, which is on sale at the museum.) A year after his “retirement” from the Sun-Times, while attaching a snow plow to his Jeep, Mauldin crushed his drawing hand (the left), making further work difficult. Then, in 2000, suffering from Alzheimer’s, he essentially cooked himself in a bathtub. He lived for three years after the scalding, but never recovered.
