Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of Oct. 29th
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It is the 302nd day of the year, leaving 63 days remaining in 2022.
On this date in 1921, the illustrator and cartoonist Bill Mauldin was born.
He told his stories with pencil and ink drawings, depicting the lives of ordinary American soldiers on the battlefields of World War II. He showed them having a gentle weariness and the grim realties of war. Soldiers enjoyed and shared the cartoons, while the brass accepted how they kept up the morale of the troops.
Portraying the typical infantryman in the characters of
Willie and Joe, Mauldin showed they were doing their duty, suffering the horrors, but carrying on as they must.
Willie and Joe, Mauldin showed they were doing their duty, suffering the horrors, but carrying on as they must.
He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1940, and started drawing cartoons for the unit's newspaper. By 1943, he was fighting in the Italian theater, and his cartoons were appearing in The Stars and Stripes newspaper. When Gen. George Patton wanted to end Mauldin's work because it criticized him, General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower said no, because it is "the soldiers' paper."
In 1945, Mauldin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his wartime work.
Afterwards, he started drawing political cartoons for, among others, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he won a second Pulitzer in 1958. He also drew cartoons for the Chicago Sun-Times, and illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Sports Illustrated, among others.
Mauldin died in 2003.
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