Joshua Kendall | Trudeau & Doonesbury | Biography | Ep. 17

Joshua Kendall reads from Trudeau & Doonesbury, his new biography of Garry Trudeau, the famously press-shy Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. In this episode, we discuss a passage outlining the sexism found in strips Trudeau created during his undergraduate years as well as his evolution into more progressive, feminist politics as he reached the national stage. Josh talks to Jon and Cory about:

• Mining the two hundred boxes of papers that Trudeau had donated to Yale
• Finding Trudeau's crude early strips on his first day in the archives, and the doubts it raised about taking on the project
• The value of a good paper trail, and how phones, email, and texting have made biographers' jobs harder

• His first biography of a living person, and why dead subjects are easier to write about

• Approaching his biography as if he were writing a nineteenth century novel, with his subject’s story as a bildungsroman

• His membership in the Biographers International Organization and why biography is a relational problem before it's a writing problem
• Robert Caro's Working, and copying Caro's trick of standing in a place at the exact hour his subject would have been there
  
  Josh's passage:
  Trudeau himself would soon be shocked and disgusted by the blatant misogyny of his earliest strips. And within a few years of finishing Yale, he would be open about his own boorishness as an undergraduate. As he told journalist Katie Leishman in 1975, “I was singled out as the number one male chauvinist pig on campus. The woman had documented proof—you know, they'd print something about me and then submit a cartoon I'd drawn as People's Exhibit A. Of course, they were right. If you read those strips now, they'd turn your stomach. I did a lot of soul-searching and reading.” In September 72, Trudeau created the character of Joanie Caucus, who, he added, enabled him to address “women's problems in the context of real women.”
  

  But the sexism of Trudeau's earliest strips would eventually be mostly forgotten. In 1989, Emily Bazelon—the scribe for The New York Times Magazine was then a first year student at Yale— worked on a book of essays commemorating the twentieth anniversary of coeducation. “I stuck in a bunch of strips from Doonesbury,” she tells me. “It was a relief and very exciting to see his feminist sensibility,” she adds. When I allude to the earlier crude strips in bull tales about Mike's dating woes, Bazelon admits, “Well, I never knew about those!”