Trudeau & Doonesbury: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Joshua Kendall chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Trudeau & Doonesbury: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: • Why Joshua Kendall conceived of Trudeau & Doonesbury as a dual biography of the reclusive cartoonist Garry Trudeau and Doonesbury, his famous comic strip.  • How Trudeau transformed his Yale campus strip Bull Tales into Doonesbury, bringing sex, drugs, rock and roll, war and political satire to newspaper comic pages, and pioneering what became known as the reported comic strip. • How 200 boxes of Trudeau’s papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library enabled Joshua to reconstruct the evolution of the artist and his work. • Why Trudeau described the book as unopposed rather than authorised. • How Joshua gradually gained the cooperation of a famously private subject while preserving his independence as a biographer. • How Joshua assessed conflicting memories against archival evidence. • How Trudeau’s changing treatment of war, from the comparatively shallow Vietnam-era strips to B. D.’s amputation and post-traumatic stress after Iraq, reveals the deepening empathy and maturity of both the cartoonist and his art. • The ethical decisions involved in writing about a living subject and his family. • How Joshua approached the unusual challenge of concluding the biography of a living subject. • Why Joshua regards biography as a distinctive form combining storytelling, history, cultural analysis and access to the inner and emotional life.