Bill Mauldin

The cartoonist of the ordinary soldier. Drawing for the Army paper Stars and Stripes in World War II, Mauldin perfected Willie and Joe, two muddy, weary dogfaces whose tired jokes showed home the drabness of a foot soldier's life. The cartoons won him a Pulitzer in 1945, and he later won a second. His best-known postwar drawing shows the statue in the Lincoln Memorial weeping behind its hands, drawn after President Kennedy's assassination. The wartime panels are scruffy and unheroic on purpose, which is why they still read as true.