Book Review: Trudeau and Doonesbury

For more than 50 years, Doonesbury has helped drive the national conversation. The first comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize, Garry Trudeau’s sprawling narrative featuring a host of beloved characters has reflected America back to itself, capturing the highlights and lowlights of American politics and culture with wit and penetrating insight. And as Doonesbury’s characters aged alongside their creator, Trudeau became one of the preeminent chroniclers of the Baby Boom generation.

Biographer Joshua Kendall tells the story of the cartoonist and what drove him to put pen to paper. He traces Trudeau’s boyhood in the Adirondack Mountains, his teenage angst in prep school, and his formative years at Yale, where he began drawing his iconic strip. And he shows the changing world it reflected; Doonesbury began appearing in papers nationwide in 1970, and big events, from Watergate to the the war in Vietnam, fueled its popularity and its significance.

Trudeau and Doonesbury: A Biography by Joshua Kendall will be published May 26, 2026. Abrams Press provided an early galley for review.

I was discovering the comic pages around the time Doonesbury launched in the early 70's, though I was way too young to understand it. Still, it was a constant all through my high school years and well beyond, always there among the other strips as a foundational reminder.

Kendall spends ample time on Trudeau's years at Yale, where the cartoonist's style and viewpoints developed. I was pleased to see how many names I recognized who passed through those hallowed halls around the time Garry did. I also appreciated the mentioning of the 1977 animated special (which I then sought out online to watch) and how this strip inspired others that began in the late 70's.

The inclusion of selected weekday and Sunday strips throughout the text really helps to punctuate the journey (of both the strip and of our country) across the decades. The thorough overview makes me want to seek out and read some collections of the work. Overall, it is a reminder of how comic strips can be both informative and entertaining under the right creators. Garry Trudeau is indeed one of those notable creators.

Highly recommended for fans of the strip or of comics in general.