Garretson Beekman Trudeau (born July 21, 1948) is an American cartoonist best known for creating the Doonesbury political satirical comic strip.
Trudeau won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1975, making him the first comic strip artist to win a Pulitzer. He is one of only two comic strip artists to win the award, the other being Berkeley Breathed, whose work was influenced by Trudeau. Trudeau was also the creator and executive producer of the Amazon Studios political comedy series Alpha House.
Contents
Early life and education
Trudeau was born in New York City, the son of Jean Douglas (née Moore, daughter of New York Assembly member Thomas Channing Moore) and Francis Berger Trudeau Jr. He is the great-grandson of Edward Livingston Trudeau, who created Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium for the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis at Saranac Lake, New York. Edward was succeeded by his son Francis and grandson Francis Jr. The latter founded the Trudeau Institute at Saranac Lake, with which Garry Trudeau retains a connection.
Raised in Saranac Lake, Trudeau attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. He enrolled in Yale University in 1966. As an art major, Trudeau initially focused on painting, but soon discovered a greater interest in the graphic arts. He spent much of his time cartooning and writing for Yale's humor magazine The Yale Record, eventually serving as the magazine's editor-in-chief. At the same time, Trudeau began contributing to the Yale Daily News, which eventually led to the creation of Bull Tales, a comic strip parodying the exploits of Yale quarterback Brian Dowling. This strip was the progenitor of Doonesbury.
While still an undergraduate at Yale, Trudeau published two collections of Bull Tales: Bull Tales (1969, published by the Yale Daily News) and Michael J. (1970, published by The Yale Record).
As a senior, Trudeau became a member of Scroll and Key. He did postgraduate work at the Yale School of Art, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in graphic design in 1973. It was there that Trudeau first met photographer David Levinthal, with whom he collaborated on Hitler Moves East, an influential "graphic chronicle" of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
Creative works
Soon after Bull Tales began running in the Yale student newspaper, the strip caught the attention of the newly formed Universal Press Syndicate. The syndicate's editor, James F. Andrews, recruited Trudeau, changed the strip's name to Doonesbury, and began distributing it following the cartoonist's graduation in 1970. Today Doonesbury is syndicated to 1,000 daily and Sunday newspapers worldwide and is accessible online in association with The Washington Post.
In 1975, Trudeau became the first comic strip artist to win a Pulitzer, traditionally awarded to editorial-page cartoonists. He was also a Pulitzer finalist in 1990, 2004, and 2005. Other awards during this time include the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award in 1994, the Reuben Award from the National Cartoonist Society in 1995, the George Orwell Award in 1994, and the Forte dei Marmi Prize for Satire 1990 in Italy,
Awards received in the 21st century include: The Max & Moritz Award for Best Comic Strip (2006, Germany) the Harvey Award, Best Syndicated Strip (2011),
the George Polk Award, Lifetime Achievement (2015), and the National Cartoonist Society's Gold T-Square (2021).
Trudeau's work has been recognized by fellowships and halls of fame. In 1993, Trudeau was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2021, he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, and the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2023.
Wiley Miller, fellow comic-strip artist responsible for Non Sequitur, called him "far and away the most influential editorial cartoonist in the last 25 years". A regular graduation speaker, Trudeau has received 37 honorary degrees.
In addition to his creating his strip, Trudeau has worked in both theater and television. He was nominated for an Oscar in 1977 in the category of Animated Short Film for A Doonesbury Special, created for NBC in collaboration with John and Faith Hubley. The film won the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize in 1978. In 1984, with composer Elizabeth Swados, he wrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway musical Doonesbury, for which he was nominated for two Drama Desk Awards. A cast album of the show, recorded for MCA, received a Grammy nomination. Trudeau again collaborated with Swados in 1984, this time on Rap Master Ronnie, a satirical revue about the Reagan Administration that opened off-Broadway at the Village Gate. A filmed version, featuring Jon Cryer, the Smothers Brothers, and Carol Kane, was broadcast on Cinemax in 1988.
Private life and public appearances
Trudeau married Jane Pauley on June 14, 1980; they have three children.
He maintains a low personal profile. A rare early appearance on television was as a guest on To Tell the Truth in 1971, where only one of the three panelists guessed his identity. In 1990, Trudeau appeared on the cover of Newsweek for Inside Doonesbury's Brain, a story written by Jonathan Alter. This was the first interview Trudeau had given in 17 years.
Trudeau cooperated extensively with Wired magazine for a 2000 profile, "The Revolution Will be Satirized". He later spoke with the writer of that article, Edward Cone, for a 2004 newspaper column in the Greensboro, North Carolina, News & Record, about the war wounds suffered by the Doonesbury character "B.D.", and in 2006 did a Q&A at Cone's personal blog about The Sandbox. Trudeau granted an interview to Rolling Stone in 2004 in which he discussed his time at Yale, which he entered two years after George W. Bush. He granted another Rolling Stone interview in 2010. In 2006, The Washington Post printed an extensive profile of Trudeau by writer Gene Weingarten. He appeared on the Charlie Rose television program, and at signings for The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time, his Doonesbury book about B.D.'s struggle with injuries received during the second Gulf War.
On August 1, 2016, Trudeau appeared on MSNBC on The Rachel Maddow Show. He was brought on to discuss his prediction about Donald Trump's plans to run for president almost three decades earlier. Maddow presented cartoon strips from as far back as 1987. Trudeau was on her show to promote his new book Yuge, which covers 30 years of Trump appearing in Doonesbury. On November 7, 2016, Trudeau appeared on Fresh Air with Terry Gross to discuss Yuge. On the CBS News Sunday Morning broadcast of December 2, 2018, he was featured and was interviewed by his wife, Jane Pauley.
Appraisals and controversies
Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation, called Doonesbury "one of the great intellectual/artistic accomplishments of the past half-century, irrespective of category".
Trudeau has also attracted criticism both for the comic strip and for his own opinions. In 1985, responding to changes after his 1983–1984 hiatus in Doonesbury, readers of The Saturday Review voted Trudeau one of the "Most Overrated People in American Arts and Letters", stating that after his hiatus, his comic strip was "predictable, mean-spirited, and not as funny as before." Trudeau's acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving a Polk Award in 2015 for lifetime achievement stirred controversy. In the speech, Trudeau criticized the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo—some of whom had recently been killed by terrorists after publishing anti-Muslim cartoons —for "punching downward... attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons", and thereby wandering "into the realm of hate speech" with cartoons of Muhammad. Writing in The Atlantic, in which Trudeau had published his speech, political commentator David Frum criticized what he called Trudeau's "moral theory" that calls for identifying "the bearer of privilege", then holding "the privilege-bearer responsible".
In 2026, Trudeau was the subject of a biography by journalist Joshua Kendall entititled Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News Into Art. Garry Trudeau calls the new biography ‘Unopposed."
