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Aimless Drifting. With five wartime books—among them the best-selling Up Front—and a 1945 Pulitzer Prize for cartooning to his credit, Mauldin came back from the war, at 23 a celebrity who had to shave only twice a week. His 1942 marriage had foundered in a messy divorce, and like many another G.I., he had a hard time readjusting to civilian life. "I never quite could shake off the guilt feeling that I had made something good out of the war," he says. "It wasn't a nice feeling." Willie and Joe also had trouble readjusting to civvies (they wound up running a gas station, wearing surplus officer caps). Against the advice of his horrified syndicate, Mauldin let them expire in six months, began lashing out in half-baked rage at the Ku Klux Klan, race discrimination and the American Legion. "I didn't have very much to say," he admits now. "I became a bore." Too often his work was shrill and off target. The syndication evaporated steadily, during one period at the rate of one paper a day. Among the defectors: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When his contract lapsed in 1948, Mauldin did not seek to renew it.
Bill Mauldin thereupon began the aimless drifting that was to mark his next decade. He published four more books, wrote five unpublished novels and an unpublished play. He acted in two war movies, Teresa and The Red Badge of Courage. He covered Korea for Collier's. Suddenly fascinated by flying, he acquired a $9,000 Piper Tri-Pacer by writing and illustrating company promotion, and winged restlessly about the U.S. "That airplane," said a friend, "was just a great big Yo-Yo for Bill to play with."
In 1956, playing country squire with a 10-acre estate 35 miles north of Manhattan, Mauldin ran for Congress as a Democrat in a Republican stronghold: New York State's 28th Congressional District. Politician Mauldin was predictably defeated by the Republican incumbent, Katharine St. George, came out of the experience "broke and through with politics."
"Take Ten Years." One winter's day in 1958, flying east on a magazine assignment, Mauldin was grounded by bad weather in St. Louis. On impulse, he paid a visit to the Post-Dispatch's Dan Fitzpatrick, whom Mauldin had long admired. To Mauldin's surprise, he found Fitz on the eve of retirement. Did Mauldin have any suggestions about a replacement? "Sure," said Mauldin. "Hire me." Two months later, he stepped into Fitzpatrick's shoes.
By then, the paper had thoroughly cased its man and passed favorable judgment. "The nicest thing they said to me when I came," says Mauldin, "was to tell me to relax. They said if I needed ten years to find my style, take ten years." The applied psychology worked fine. "In the beginning. Bill's drawings were a bit stilted," said Publisher Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who hired Mauldin. "But that was only for a matter of weeks. In Mauldin we very quickly discovered we had a terrifically original cartoonist. He has a great sense of humor and a profound sense of dignity in the liberal tradition of our newspaper."