Garry Trudeau, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Doonesbury, joins us for a conversation about his boundary-busting comic strip, his invention of a new kind of visual journalism, and Joshua Kendall’s definitive new biography, Trudeau & Doonesbury.
Emerging at the height of the Vietnam War in 1970, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury helped shaped American politics and pop culture for more than 50 years — the first comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize, the sprawling narrative reflected the nation back to itself with wit and penetrating insight. Drawing on newly uncovered archival materials and extensive interviews with fellow cartoonists, prominent journalists, and even politicians who were mocked in the strip, Joshua Kendall’s Trudeau & Doonesbury is more than a biography — it is an incisive cultural history told through Trudeau’s remarkable life, showing how Trudeau became "one of our nation’s greatest journalists" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) and a preeminent chronicler of the Baby Boom generation.
In a conversation celebrating the book’s launch, hear Trudeau and Kendall discuss Trudeau’s life and the remarkable arc of Doonesbury — the strip’s emergence from the Vietnam era, its rise to prominence at the height of the Watergate scandal, and its innovative visual blend of reportage and barbed political satire, and the changing world that the strip reflected through 50 years of American history.