A short life of the author
Bill Mauldin (29 October 1921 – 22 January 2003) was an American editorial cartoonist who created Willie and Joe — two unshaven, exhausted, sardonic infantrymen — and in doing so produced the most honest, the most compassionate, and the most enduring visual representation of the American combat soldier in World War II. Mauldin drew Willie and Joe from direct experience: he was a combat infantryman himself, serving with the 45th Infantry Division in Sicily, Italy, and France, and his cartoons, published in the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, were created in foxholes, in bombed-out buildings, and in the mud. He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1945, at age twenty-three — the youngest person to receive the award at that time — and his book Up Front (1945) is one of the essential American books about World War II.
Life
Mauldin was born in Mountain Park, New Mexico, and grew up in poverty in various Southwestern towns. He studied cartooning through a correspondence course and at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts before enlisting in the Army in 1940. He was assigned to the 45th Infantry Division and began drawing cartoons for the division newspaper, the 45th Division News.
When the 45th Division shipped overseas in 1943, Mauldin went with it — not as a rear-echelon journalist but as a combat soldier who drew cartoons. He landed in Sicily, fought through Italy, and eventually transferred to Stars and Stripes, the official Army newspaper, where his cartoons reached millions of American soldiers.
Willie and Joe emerged gradually from Mauldin’s early cartoons. They are not heroic figures — they are tired, dirty, unshaven, cynical, and profoundly unglamorous. They complain about the food, the weather, the officers, and the war itself. They have no illusions about glory. And they endure — not because they are brave in the conventional sense but because they have no choice, and because they take care of each other.
Mauldin’s cartoons infuriated General George S. Patton, who despised their unmilitary appearance and their implicit criticism of the officer class. Patton threatened to ban Stars and Stripes from the Third Army area. Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, intervened on Mauldin’s behalf — he understood that the cartoons told the truth about what combat soldiers experienced, and that truth was more valuable to morale than Patton’s spit-and-polish discipline.
Up Front (1945)
Up Front combines Mauldin’s cartoons with prose descriptions of life at the front — the cold, the fear, the black humor, the random death, the small kindnesses between exhausted men. The writing is plain, direct, and often very funny. Mauldin does not sentimentalise combat; he describes it as it was experienced by the ordinary infantry soldier, and the result is one of the most truthful American war books.
The book was an immediate bestseller. Ernie Pyle, the great war correspondent, praised it. Veterans recognised themselves in Willie and Joe and in Mauldin’s prose. Up Front remains in print and is still read by veterans of subsequent wars.
Postwar Career
Mauldin’s postwar career was distinguished but difficult. Back Home (1947) described the awkward readjustment of returning veterans. He worked as an editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Sun-Times, winning a second Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for a cartoon about Soviet author Boris Pasternak. His postwar cartoons addressed civil rights, nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, and domestic politics with the same directness and moral clarity that had characterised his wartime work.
He ran for Congress in New York in 1956 (he lost) and acted occasionally in films. But his reputation rested always on Willie and Joe, and when he died in 2003, his obituaries universally described him as the cartoonist who had told the truth about what it was like to be an American infantryman.
Critical Standing
Mauldin is one of the great American cartoonists and one of the essential voices of the World War II generation. Up Front stands alongside Ernie Pyle’s dispatches and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed as a definitive account of what combat was like for ordinary soldiers.
Collecting Mauldin
Up Front (1945, Henry Holt) in first edition with dust jacket brings $50–$150. Bill Mauldin’s Army (1951, William Sloane) brings $30–$60. Back Home (1947, William Sloane) brings $20–$50. Original Mauldin cartoons and drawings, when they appear at auction, bring $1,000–$10,000 depending on subject and significance. Signed copies of Up Front are available and bring $100–$250.