Garry Trudeau
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Garretson Beekman Trudeau (born July 21, 1948, in New York City) is an American cartoonist, best known for the Doonesbury comic strip.
Trudeau is the great-grandson of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, who created facilities for the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis at Saranac Lake, New York State. Edward was succeeded by his son Francis and grandson Francis Jr. The latter founded the Trudeau Institute at Saranac Lake, with which his son Garry retains a connection.[1]
Raised in Saranac Lake, Garry Trudeau 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. He also attended the Yale School of Art, earning his M.F.A. in graphic design in 1973.
Doonesbury is syndicated to almost 1,400 newspapers worldwide and is accessible online in association with Slate at (see [2]).
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 was also nominated for an Oscar in 1977 in the category of Animated Short Film, for The Doonesbury Special, in collaboration with John Hubley and Faith Hubley.
His other awards include the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 1994, and their Reuben Award for 1995.
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 Doonesbury: A Musical Comedy) and the 1988 HBO miniseries Tanner '88, directed by Robert Altman.
He married the journalist Jane Pauley in 1980, and lives on Central Park West in New York City. He is distantly related to the late former Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (via common ancestor Etienne 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 August 2001, Trudeau and The Guardian both fell for a false Lovenstein Institute IQ Report that stated that President George W. Bush had the lowest IQ (91) of any president in the past 50 years. The Guardian published an article while Trudeau published a comic strip based on the given information. Also, the report stated that former president Bill Clinton had exactly twice the IQ of Bush. Both later realized they had fallen for the hoax, and both made public retractions.[3][4]
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. (See George W. Bush military service controversy for more complete coverage.)
Trudeau also granted an interview with Rolling Stone in 2004 in which he discussed his time at Yale University, which he attended two years behind George W. Bush. In 2006, The Washington Post printed an article that writer Gene Weingarten referred to as the "first extensive profile of him (Trudeau) in the 36 years since he began the comic strip." [5]
He also famously said in Richard Saul Wurman's Follow The Yellow Brick Road, that "Whether revered or reviled in their lifetimes, history’s movers framed their questions in ways that were entirely disrespectful of conventional wisdom. Civilization has always advanced in the shimmering wake of its discontents."
