THE REAL GI BILL

If it's big," Bill Mauldin used to say, "hit it." And that's what he did for nearly 50 years, primarily as a cartoonist but also as a writer. He hit everybody from arrogant military brass to witch-hunting politicians to redneck white supremacists to mass-murdering dictators. He excelled at doing it -- it won him two Pulitzer Prizes -- and his audiences loved it.

His first audience, of course, consisted of his fellow soldiers. He and Scripps-Howard correspondent Ernie Pyle were the most beloved and trusted journalists of World War II, especially by the combat infantrymen they championed.

In "Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front," Todd DePastino, a historian at Waynesburg College in Pennsylvania, has written a commendable, readable first biography of Mauldin. It is more detailed on Mauldin's professional life than on his domestic life with three wives and eight children. Also, three-fifths of it is given over to the first 24 of his 81 years, but that is understandable, given that his fame, despite numerous awards and accomplishments in later decades, always rested on his creation of the "dogface soldiers" Willie and Joe.

Mauldin was born in Mountain Park, N.M., on Oct. 29, 1921. Any dictionary could well use "Bill Mauldin's childhood" as a definition for "hardscrabble." It was a hard time in a poor and dysfunctional family.

He had abilities in reading, drawing, math and deduction that were near genius level but not given outlets -- except those Mauldin created himself through sheer grit. His only introduction to art was what he saw in cartoons and a $20 correspondence course in cartooning.

Yet he took things of value from that hard time. His father's quixotically principled personality, the author says, "strengthened Bill's reflexive sympathy for the underdog, his skeptical attitude toward power, and his intense desire to wield an authority of his own."

After attending high school in Phoenix and then spending a year at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where he continued to relentlessly submit cartoons to magazines despite limited success, he returned to Arizona, still craving money, recognition and the opportunity to display his skills. To get a little of the first, in 1940 he joined the Arizona National Guard, which eventually led to a lot of the second two.

"He assimilated the men's grievances into his own," DePastino writes. He grew increasingly jaundiced toward military authority, particularly Gen. George Patton, who repeatedly but unsuccessfully attempted to silence Mauldin.

DePastino's analysis of the significance of Mauldin's work and its changes over time is one of the strengths of the book. Dozens of illustrations show his style maturing, his humor becoming sharper, wittier and more satirical.

Sgt. Bill Mauldin left the Army in 1945, a wealthy and famous man with a bestselling book ("Up Front") and a Pulitzer under his belt. He was gratified at winning the prize, but also felt guilty over having escaped the infantry and angry at himself for having sanitized horrors.

Always fiercely liberal, he turned quite radical for a time after the war. He continued to draw. He also wrote books, acted in movies, ran for Congress from New York (and lost).

In April 1958, he joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as editorial cartoonist. Six months later he won his second Pulitzer.

Mauldin was not fond of what he called VFW and American Legion "types" and their hearty bonhomie. Yet in his final decade, he became increasingly the captive of the legend that aging veterans built around him.

In 2000, befuddled by encroaching Alzheimer's, he badly scalded himself in a tub of hot water. I can think of no other creative artist, except Ross Macdonald, whose sad descent into the Alzheimer's night is so affecting to read about as Mauldin's. He died Jan. 22, 2003, and is buried in Arlington Cemetery.