Off Topic---Biography: Bill Mauldin and the Common Soldier

Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, Todd DiPastino, W. W. Norton Publishing, 370 pp, illustrated, index, notes, 2008, $27.95 (hc), $14.95 (pb)

American Civil War readers often encounter Walt Whitman's statement, “The real war will never get in the books.” That statement is now assumed to be true of all American Wars. Todd DePastino shows how cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose subject was the American combat soldier during World War II, did get the real war into the books. Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front is authoritative but not exhaustive biography. DiPastino's focus is on the creative work of Mauldin. There are many more stories that could be told

Mauldin grew up during the Great Depression in the mountainous region of New Mexico. Raised by eccentric parents, Mauldin's family was very poor. Taking advantage of very limited resources such as his high school's ROTC-style club, student newspaper and yearbook, as well as several very fine art teachers, Mauldin managed to gain admission and pay the tuition at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for one year. To establish an income he joined the newly mobilized 45th Infantry Division of the Arizona National Guard and then became the 45th Division News's cartoonist.

Deployed to North Africa in 1943, Mauldin participated in the invasions of Sicily and Italy; later he was assigned to France. In 1944, while on staff at the army's newspaper Stars and Stripes, Mauldin created unique characters that irritated the army brass, even George Patton. The weary, disheveled, officer-abusing enlisted men Willie and Joe became soldiers' heroes as the cartoon characters uttered thoughts that could not be spoken to an officer.

After the war and in the course of his life, Mauldin published several bestselling cartoon collections, two autobiographies, acted in Hollywood, ran unsuccessfully for Congress and received his career with two Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning. Thoroughly researched with the immense cooperation of Mauldin's family and friends, DePastino's biography is an introduction to an American who set standards for illustration and content that are stilled used today. His impact on his profession is immense. Charles Schultz, leader of a machine gun squad in Europe and creator of the cartoon Peanuts, recognized Mauldin as a hero of both WWII infantrymen and cartoonists.

DiPastino's focus is on Mauldin's career and dwells on family issues as they relate to his journalism. The author's thorough research supports his frankness in describing the women, alcohol, and personal tensions in Mauldin's post WWII career. Containing more than ninety cartoons and photographs, DiPastino's work sets the reader within Mauldin's historical era. Accessible in style, DiPastino's work moves thoroughly but not tediously through WW II and post-war veteran issues, American journalism and politics, and the changes in Mauldin's drawing techniques. Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front is recommended for advanced placement high school students and up. Anyone who enjoys reading a biography of a soldier and artist whom the odds of success were set firmly against, who at times created his own luck and at other times had unexplainable good fortune, who was born with a gift and did not squander it will be satisfied with DiPastio's work.

Image: Bill Mauldin, Willie and Joe (1944)


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Off Topic Biography---Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Teller of Many Tales In Many Genres

Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, Daniel Stashower, Henry Holt Books, Inc, 472 pp., index, bibliography, illustrations, 1999, $16.00.

I say Arthur Conan Doyle and you say Sherlock Holmes. But don't stop there. Doyle lived a very long, complicated and multi-layered life. This biography won the 1999 Edgar (Allan Poe) Award for Best Biographical Work and it generously explores the origins of Doyle's detective fiction, his science fiction, his fantasy fiction, his historical adventure fiction and his military histories. Sired by an alcoholic father, Doyle was born in 1859 to a Scots family with a very strong, enduring mother. He started as a very young whaling ship's doctor looking for adventure and soon afterward became a struggling provincial doctor who with few patients and time on his hands. He then decided to write his way out of poverty.

The extended Doyle clan were prosperous Irish-Catholic families, who had a prominent position in the art world. Charles Doyle, Arthur's father, a chronic alcoholic, was the only member of his family, who apart from fathering a brilliant son, never accomplished anything of note and was institutionalized for the greater part of Arthur's life. At the age of twenty-two, Charles had married Mary Foley, a vivacious and very well educated young woman of seventeen.

Mary Doyle had a passion for books and was a master storyteller. Her son Arthur wrote of his mother's gift of "sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper" when she reached the culminating point of a story. There was little money in the family and even less harmony on account of his father's excesses and erratic behavior. Arthur's touching description of his mother's beneficial influence is also poignantly described in his biography, "In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life."

It is safe to say that Arthur Conan Doyle turned his life's adventure into literature. As a whaling crew's physician and adventurer, he walked on ice floes, killed seals, and nearly drowned. As a merchantman's crew physician he explored the coast of Africa and battled typhoid among the crew and within himself. As a war correspondent, as a medical volunteer in during the Boer War, as WWI front line army administration observer, he always wrote for himself, his familiar and then later turned the adventure into fiction or military history.

Made famous by Sherlock Holmes, Doyle created other popular characters such as Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard. Challenger visited The Lost World
and Brigadier Girard a variety of Victorian Era conflicts. Doyle wrote and invested his theatre plays, sometimes writing well and making returns on his money, other times not. Critics give Doyle recognition for his combat scenes in The White Company and in his administrative reports from the European and Italian Fronts of WWI. In three instances, Doyle challenged judicial convictions of those whom he felt to be innocent or unrepresented before the bar. Establishing a reputation that would be today called an Innocense Mission, he investigated and paid from his own pocket judicial appeals in capital and non-capital crimes.

Throughout his life, he felt infuriated, challenged, and intrigued by the spiritual realm. Having been sternly educated in a Jesuit school, exposed to other cultures view of death in his travels, and finding evidence of an afterlife in his own life's experiences, Doyle practiced Spiritualism. Mediums using automatic writing and channeling spirits were apart of the last three decades of Doyle's life. In part, having lost sons and nephews in WWI, his investigation of Spiritualism gave him some comfort. Spiritualism came to the fore during the 1830s and continued to be matter of scientific investigation by early psychologists through until 1930s in both Europe and America.

Hale and hardy throughout his life, Doyle eagerly embraced sports but not hunting. An avid but unskilled driver of the new automobile, he wrecked a vehicle near his house and was pinned under the car in such a fashion that his back carried the weight of the vehicle. After several minutes his nearby friends lifted the auto off of him and he slowly walked away from the accident. With his reputation for great strength, none of his friends were surprised that his back could carry the weight of vehicle for several minutes and not collapse his chest.

Stashower's biography is well worth reading for its glimpse into the Victorian Era and its description of a writer's life well lived.

For Further Information: Sherlock Holmes on The Web that has a fairly comprehensive collection of research, bibliography, chronology, and literary history and criticism resources.