Garretson Beekman (Garry) Trudeau (born 1948) was a comic-strip cartoonist, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of "Doonesbury," playwright, and animated cartoon-maker for film and television.

Garry Trudeau was born in New York to parents of Canadian ancestry. When he was five his father, a doctor, moved to Saranac Lake, New York, where Garry spent an idyllic childhood. His parents divorced in 1960, and Garry was sent to St. Paul's school in Concord, Connecticut, where he compensated for the school's overemphasis on sports by concentrating on art. During his years at Yale University, where he prepared his B.A. and M.F.A. in the School of Art and Architecture, he began to spoof his fellow students and the staff in "Bull Tales," in which most of the antics of the liberated generation were irreverently portrayed.

In 1970 John McNeel and Jim Andrews inaugurated the Universal Press Syndicate by publishing Trudeau's work under the...