Up Front

Hardcover Cloth 228 pages. Book Condition Very Good NO Dust Jacket. Stated First edition Second printing 1945. Nice tan colored boards with green embossing shows off the Willie and Joe characters on this Clean, tight, square copy with no marks or highlights. Previous owner's name written on inside endpaper. Book has Slight shelf wear with the usual yellowing to edges and pages. Remains of the original dust jacket included in a plastic bag. Not an ex-library, book club or remainder copy.

Classic book by the 23-year-old Maudlin of WWII cartoons that meant so much to GIs. Mauldin won a Pulitzer Prize for his wartime body of work. The first civilian compilation of his work, Up Front, a collection of his cartoons interwoven with his observations of war, topped the best-seller list in 1945.

During World War II, the truest glimpse most Americans got of the "real war" came through the flashing black lines of twenty-two-year-old infantry sergeant Bill Mauldin. Week after week, Mauldin defied army censors, German artillery, and Patton's pledge to "throw his ass in jail" to deliver his wildly popular cartoon, "Up Front," to the pages of Stars and Stripes . "Up Front" featured the wise-cracking Willie and Joe, whose stooped shoulders, mud-soaked uniforms, and pidgin of army slang and slum dialect bore eloquent witness to the world of combat and the men who lived―and died―in it.

William Henry "Bill" Mauldin was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist from the United States. He was most famous for his World War II cartoons depicting American soldiers, as represented by the archetypal characters Willie and Joe. These cartoons were broadly published and distributed in the American army abroad and in the United States.