Garry Trudeau (Full Name: Garretson
Beekman Trudeau) is an American
cartoonist. He attended
St. Paul's School and then Yale University in the late
1960s, where he developed his most famous creation,
the daily comic strip Doonesbury, and was a member of
Scroll and Key.
Doonesbury is syndicated to almost 1,400 newspapers
worldwide.
In 1975, he became the first comic strip artist to
win a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. The award
was controversial at the time, since it is traditionally
awarded to editorial page cartoonists. He is also the
recipient of an Oscar in the category for Animated Short
Film, for The Doonesbury Special, with John Hubley and
Faith Hubley.
He was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 1993. Wiley Miller, fellow comic strip
artist responsible for Non Sequitur, called Trudeau "far
and away the most influential editorial cartoonist in
the last 25 years."
In addition to his work on Doonesbury, Trudeau has
written plays (such as Rap Master Ronnie and a Doonesbury
musical) and the 1988 HBO miniseries Tanner '88, directed
by Robert Altman.
He married the journalist Jane Pauley in 1980. He
is distantly related to former Canadian prime minister
Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Trudeau maintains a low personal profile. A rare and
early appearance on television was as a guest on To
Tell the Truth in 1971, where all but one of the panelists
failed to guess his identity.
In 2004, Trudeau made a widely-circulated offer of
a $10,000 reward for proof that George W. Bush fulfilled
his military duties in the 1970s. |