Trudeau & Doonesbury: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art

Summary

THE DEFINITIVE ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE AND WORK OF GARRY TRUDEAU, CREATOR OF THE MASSIVELY POPULAR AND INFLUENTIAL CARTOON DOONESBURY

For more than fifty years, Doonesbury has helped drive the national conversation. The first comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize, Garry Trudeau’s sprawling narrative featuring a host of beloved characters has reflected America back to itself, capturing the highlights and lowlights of American politics and culture with wit and penetrating insight. And as Doonesbury’s characters aged alongside their creator, Trudeau became one of the preeminent chroniclers of the baby boom generation.

In Trudeau & Doonesbury, biographer Joshua Kendall tells the story of the cartoonist and what drove him to put pen to paper. He traces Trudeau’s boyhood in the Adirondack Mountains, his teenage angst in prep school, and his formative years at Yale, where he began drawing his iconic strip. And he shows the changing world it reflected; Doonesbury began appearing in papers nationwide in 1970, and big events from Watergate to the war in Vietnam fueled its popularity—and its significance. Drawing on previously unmined archival materials and extensive interviews with Trudeau, his friends, fellow cartoonists, prominent journalists, and even politicians who were mocked in the strip, Trudeau & Doonesbury is an entertaining romp through both Trudeau’s remarkable life and the past half century of American history.

“In this fast-paced, engaging narrative, Joshua Kendall traces the arc of Trudeau’s exemplary career. Kendall’s entertaining book will provide readers with both a deeper understanding of recent American history and many smiles.”—Tom Brokaw, anchor of NBC Nightly News from 1982 to 2004 and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Greatest Generation