If it's big," Bill Mauldin used to say, "hit it."

That's what he did for nearly 50 years, primarily as a cartoonist but also as a writer. He hit everybody from arrogant military brass to witch-hunting politicians, redneck supremacists to mass-murdering dictators. He excelled at doing it -- it won him two Pulitzer Prizes -- and his audiences loved it.

		"BILL MAULDIN: A LIFE UP FRONT" By Todd DePastino Norton ($27.95)

His first audience was his fellow soldiers. He and Scripps-Howard correspondent Ernie Pyle were the most beloved and trusted journalists of World War II, especially by the combat infantrymen they championed.

Mt. Lebanon resident Todd DePastino has written a commendable, readable first biography of Mauldin. It is more detailed on the cartoonist's professional life than on his domestic life, which included three wives and eight children.

Also, three-fifths of it is given over to the first 24 of his 81 years, but that is understandable given that his fame, despite awards and accomplishments later, rested on his creation of the "dogface soldiers," Willie and Joe.

Mauldin was born in Mountain Park, N.M., Oct. 29, 1921. If you looked in the dictionary under "hardscrabble" and found as a definition "Bill Mauldin's childhood," it would be surprising but not inappropriate. It was a hard time in a poor and dysfunctional family.

Gifted in reading, drawing, math and deduction, he had no outlets except those he created himself through sheer grit. His only introduction to art was what he saw in cartoons and a $20 correspondence course in cartooning.

Yet he took things of value from that hard time. His father's quixotically principled personality, the author says, "strengthened Bill's reflexive sympathy for the underdog, his skeptical attitude toward power, and his intense desire to wield an authority of his own."

After high school in Phoenix and then a year at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where he continued to relentlessly submit cartoons to magazines despite limited success,

After brief study in art school, he craved money, recognition and opportunity to display his skills. To get a little of the first, in 1940 he joined the Arizona National Guard, which eventually led to a lot of the remaining two.

He cartooned part time for the 45th Division News and hustled constantly to peddle his wares to civilian publications. It was not until early 1944 when he was working for the official Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, that GIs Willie and Joe finally emerged in their lasting form.

"He assimilated the men's grievances into his own," DePastino writes. It seems Mauldin grew increasingly jaundiced toward military authority, particularly Army Gen. George Patton, who repeatedly but unsuccessfully attempted to silence him.

DePastino's analysis of the significance of Mauldin's work and its changes over time is one of the strengths of the book. Dozens of his drawings show his style maturing as his humor became sharper, wittier and more satirical.

Sgt. Bill Mauldin left the Army in 1945 a wealthy and famous man, with a best-selling book ("Up Front") and his first Pulitzer under his belt. He was gratified at winning the prize, but also felt guilty over escaping the war and angry at himself for having sanitized horrors.

Always fiercely liberal, he turned quite radical for a time after the war as he continued to cartoon, write books, act in movies ("The Red Badge of Courage") and run, unsuccessfully, for Congress.

In April 1958 he joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as editorial cartoonist. Six months later he won his second Pulitzer.

He moved to the Chicago Sun-Times in June 1962, where he remained until the newspaper dropped him in 1990. It was there that he came up with, in one hour on a day off in 1963, what the author calls "perhaps the most powerful editorial cartoon of the twentieth century" -- the statue in the Lincoln Memorial bent over, head in hands, in grief at the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Mauldin also was not fond of what he called Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion "types" and their hearty bonhomie. Yet in his final decade he became increasingly the captive of the legend that aging veterans built around him.

In 2000, befuddled by encroaching Alzheimer's, he badly scalded himself in a tub of hot water. I can think of no other creative artist, except Ross Macdonald, whose sad descent into the Alzheimer's night is so affecting to read about as Mauldin's. He died Jan. 22, 2003, and is buried in Arlington Cemetery.