Garry Trudeau is the creator of the trenchant topical satire strip, Doonesbury. Born Garretson Beekman Trudeau in New York City, he grew up in the fashionable upstate resort area of Saranac Lake.

As a student in St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, which he entered in 1960, he was president of the Art Association, co-edited the yearbook, won the senior class art prize, and drew murals for a local hospital. When he went to Yale in 1966, he continued to pursue his artistic inclinations. He created a comic strip in his first year -- "a Feifferesque embarrassment," according to Time magazine, about the social failures of a Yale freshman but he made no efforts to publish it because he recognized its graphic defects. In his j...