Doug Marlette

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The Bridge (2001)

Doug Marlette is an award-winning American editorial cartoonist and writer. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina on December 6, 1949 and graduated from Florida State University. He and his wife Melinda maintain residences in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Hillsborough, North Carolina.

He has worked for the following newspapers: The Charlotte Observer (1972-1987), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1987-1989), New York Newsday (1989-2002), The Tallahassee Democrat (2002-2006), and Tulsa World (2006-present).

He writes and draws the nationally-syndicated comic strip Kudzu, which he started in 1981. Marlette collaborated with Bland Simpson and Jack Herrick of The Red Clay Ramblers on a musical adaptation of the Kudzu comic strip into Kudzu, A Southern Musical.

He has won every major award for editorial cartooning, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, the National Headliner Award for Consistently Outstanding Editorial Cartoons (three times), the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for editorial cartooning (twice), and First Prize in the John Fischetti Memorial Cartoon Competition (twice). He was the first and only cartoonist ever awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.

His Kudzu and editorial cartoons are collected in 19 volumes, including Faux Bubba: Bill and Hillary Go To Washington, Gone With The Kudzu, I Feel Your Pain!, What Would Marlette Drive?, and A Town So Backwards Even the Episcopalians Handle Snakes. His 1991 book, In Your Face: A Cartoonist at Work, is his personal account of the cartooning process.

In 2001 his first novel, The Bridge, was published by HarperCollins. The Bridge was named Best Book of the Year for Fiction by the Southeast Booksellers Association (SEBA) in 2002.

In 2006 his second novel, Magic Time, was published by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux and has received substantial early critical praise, including a positive review by Christopher Dickey in The New York Times Book Review (October 27, 2006).

He served as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 2001-2002 academic year and was inducted into the UNC Journalism Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2006 he was appointed a Gaylord Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma.