Mauldin, Bill Sur le Front

La face cachée de l'US Army. Prix Pulitzer 1945

Bill Mauldin (1921-2003), a highly gifted child from a poor family, enlisted in the military in 1940 and became a cartoonist for the major army newspaper Stars and Stripes. He was sent to the European front and was the first to describe the actual living conditions of the GIs. As the mouthpiece of the soldiers, their misery and their anger, Mauldin revealed to America the other side of the coin, the hidden side of the US Army: the big scandals and petty machinations that enraged the soldiers on the front lines. This outspoken manner earned him indescribable conflicts with some senior officers, most notably George Patton himself. Contrary to propaganda and with apt humour, Sur le Front is a biting, unclassifiable, captivating book. It won its author the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 and made him rich and famous at the age of 23. Bill Mauldin continued to draw until 1991 and received a second Pulitzer Prize in 1959. Today, he is considered one of the masters of press caricature in the United States.