Two-time Pulitzer-winning cartoonist dies

Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who gave

newspaper readers at home a sardonic view of World War II, died

Wednesday at a Newport Beach nursing home. He was 81.

Mr. Mauldin died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said

Diana Schilling, an administrator at the nursing home.

“We don’t know what the exact cause of death was, but we believe

it was respiratory failure,” she said.

Mr. Mauldin, an Army rifleman during World War II, captured the

hearts of readers with his portrayal of Willy and Joe -- two

unshaven, slovenly soldiers who survived the war while making

sarcastic remarks about their orders to their equipment and even

their allies. The cartoons were published in Stars and Stripes and

other military journals. One of his famous cartoons in the Chicago

Sun-Times showed a grieving Abraham Lincoln slumped, with his hands

covering his face, at the Lincoln Memorial after President Kennedy’s

assassination.

Mr. Mauldin was born Oct. 29, 1921, near Santa Fe, N.M., and spent

much of his life in the West. In 1945, at age 23, his series “Up

Front With Mauldin,” featuring Willie and Joe, won him the first of

his two Pulitzers for editorial cartooning. The second prize came in

1959, while he was at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for depicting

Soviet novelist Boris Pasternak saying to another gulag prisoner, “I

won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?”

After the war, Mr. Mauldin briefly freelanced. He joined the

Post-Dispatch in 1958 and moved to the Sun-Times in 1962. He also

acted in two movies, one of them John Huston’s 1951 production of

“The Red Badge of Courage.” He received several letters of support

from veterans, widows and others at the nursing home.

Mr. Mauldin is survived by ex-wives Jean Mauldin and Christine

Lund; and seven sons. Funeral arrangements were incomplete, but a

burial is planned at the Arlington National Cemetery.