Garry Trudeau
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Garretson Beekman Trudeau (born July 21, 1948) is an American cartoonist. He attended St. Paul's School and then Yale University in the late 1960s, where he developed his most famous creation, the daily comic strip Doonesbury, and was a member of Scroll and Key.
Doonesbury is syndicated to almost 1,400 newspapers worldwide.
In 1975, he became the first comic strip artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. The award was controversial at the time, since it is traditionally awarded to editorial page cartoonists. He is also the recipient of an Oscar in the category for Animated Short Film, for The Doonesbury Special, with John Hubley and Faith Hubley.
He was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993. Wiley Miller, fellow comic strip artist responsible for Non Sequitur, called Trudeau "far and away the most influential editorial cartoonist in the last 25 years."
In addition to his work on Doonesbury, Trudeau has written plays (such as Rap Master Ronnie and a Doonesbury musical) and the 1988 HBO miniseries Tanner '88, directed by Robert Altman.
He married the journalist Jane Pauley in 1980. He is distantly related to former Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Trudeau maintains a low personal profile. A rare and early appearance on television was as a guest on To Tell the Truth in 1971, where all but one of the panelists failed to guess his identity.
In 2004, Trudeau made a widely-circulated offer of a $10,000 reward for proof that George W. Bush fulfilled his military duties in the 1970s. See George W. Bush military service controversy for fuller coverage.