American editorial cartoonist and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes.

Born William Henry Mauldin at Mountain Park, N.M., in 1921, Bill Mauldin moved around the southwestern United States and northern Mexico growing up. After the divorce of his mother Edith and father Sidney (who had served as a WWI artilleryman), Mauldin moved to Phoenix, AZ. Rather than complete high school, he enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in 1939. While there he studied political cartooning with Vaughn Shoemaker. Unable to find steady illustrating work, Mauldin returned to Phoenix in 1940 and joined the Arizona National Guard in September of that year. His division was called up just days later.

While in training in Oklahoma, Mauldin got a job drawing cartoons for the 45th Division News. In 1943 he was sent to Italy and assigned to work at the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. It was there, amid fighting at Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio, that his famous characters Willie and Joe were created. Maudlin’s cartoons focused on the lives of average American GIs, depicting a side of war that resonated with many soldiers. These WWII cartoons earned him his first Pulitzer Prize in 1945. His work was syndicated in over 300 newspapers, and his book Up Front was a best-seller. After the war, Mauldin undertook various pursuits, including covering the Korean War for Collier’s, acting in two Hollywood movies, and mounting an unsuccessful congressional campaign in the state of New York. In 1958, he returned to cartooning at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was there that he won his second Pulitzer for a cartoon depicting Soviet author Boris Pasternak in a Gulag.

In 1962, Mauldin was hired by the Chicago Sun-Times. The next year he published one of his most famous cartoons following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The image depicts Abraham Lincoln seated at the Lincoln Memorial with his head in his hands. Over 250,000 requests for reprints of the drawing were placed, and Jacqueline Kennedy asked for the original, which she gave to the Kennedy Library at Harvard. Mauldin remained at the Sun-Times for three decades until his retirement in 1991. While there, he reported from locations including a U.S. air base in Vietnam (in 1965) and Israel (during the Six-Day War, in 1967). In 1985 Mauldin received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Mauldin married three times; first to Norma Jean Humphries in 1942 (div. 1946), then to Natalie Sarah Evans in 1947 (until her death in 1971), and then to Christine Lund in 1972 (div.). He was father to eight children with his three wives: Bruce, Tim, Andrew, David, John, Nat, Kaja, and Sam. Mauldin died in 2003 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Chicago husband and wife.

Patricia Lyons Simon Newman Gelbin and Matthew A. Gelbin married in the early 2000s and remained together until the former’s death in 2013. An Irish immigrant to Chicago, Patricia was the subject of the book Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime (written by her son Scott, an NPR host). Matthew, who passed away in 2015, was a WWII veteran who spent his career at Baker, Knapp & Tubbs, retiring in 1987 as Director of Sales Administration.

Patricia gave her collection of Bill Mauldin-related materials to her husband as a gift early in their relationship. She was previously married to bookseller Ralph Newman, to whom some pieces of the collection are made out by Mr. Mauldin. She and Mr. Gelbin donated the Bill Mauldin Collection to the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2007.