Postwar Activities
In 1945, at the age of 23, Mauldin won the Pulitzer Prize. The first civilian publication of his work, Up Front, was a best-seller. The cartoons are interwoven with an impassioned telling of his observations of war.
After World War II, Mauldin turned to drawing political cartoons expressing a generally civil libertarian view associated with groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union. These were not well received by newspaper editors, who were hoping for more apolitical Willie and Joe cartoons. But Mauldin's attempt to carry Willie and Joe into civilian life was also unsuccessful, as documented in his memoirs, Back Home, in 1947.
In 1959, he won the Pulitzer Prize again for a cartoon depicting Doctor Zhivago author Boris Pasternak in a Soviet GULAG with the caption "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?"
He abandoned cartooning for a while, working as a film actor, freelance writer, and illustrator of articles and books, including one on the Korean War. He drew Willie and Joe only a few times afterwards: for the funerals of Omar Bradley and George C. Marshall, both of them considered "soldiers' generals"; for a Life Magazine article on the "New Army"; and to memorialize fellow cartoonist Milton Caniff.
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