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.
Joshua KendallGuest
Gabriella Kelly-DaviesHost
