Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette, a North Carolina native who came of age during the fiery journalism era of Watergate and Vietnam and later became a novelist and playwright, died Tuesday in a car crash in Mississippi.

Marlette, who lived in Hillsborough and Oklahoma, was on his way to Oxford, Miss., where high school students were preparing his musical "Kudzu" to present at a festival in Scotland in August. The play's director had picked Marlette up at the airport in Memphis, Tenn., and was driving him to Oxford when he lost control of the Toyota pickup on a rain-drenched highway soon after 9:30 a.m.

Marlette, 57, was killed instantly when the pickup hydroplaned and struck a tree, the Mississippi Highway Patrol reported. The driver, Oxford High School theater teacher John Davenport, 33, was taken to a hospital with relatively minor injuries.

Marlette and his wife, Melinda, have lived primarily in Hillsborough since the early 1990s, but he also had a house in Tulsa, Okla. He drew cartoons for the Tulsa World newspaper and was a lecturer at the University of Oklahoma.

The funeral for his father, Elmer Marlette, was Friday in Charlotte. The cartoonist decided to stop in Oxford for a day on his way to Oklahoma.

"North Carolina, a state he worshipped, has lost one of the most creative and complete and compassionate citizens it ever had," said author Pat Conroy, Marlette's closest friend, who said they spoke on the phone daily.

Conroy said he last saw Marlette at his father's funeral.

"He gave the eulogy," Conroy said. "I'm sorry that he cannot write his own eulogy because it would be the best written."

In Hillsborough and at UNC-Chapel Hill, where Marlette gave guest lectures and briefly taught a class created just for him, reaction was shock and sadness. "He was nothing short of splendid," said Richard Cole, former dean of the UNC-CH journalism school and now a professor.

Born in Greensboro, Marlette was raised in Durham, Mississippi and Florida. He gained fame drawing editorial cartoons for The Charlotte Observer, where he arrived in 1972 as a skinny, long-haired 22-year-old out of Florida State University.

"He was such a lightning rod, and he was so willing to challenge conventional authority, that it really made it easy for us to take on the establishment," said Mark Ethridge, a friend and former managing editor at The Charlotte Observer.

Marlette's cartoons immediately roiled the city, as well as one of the newspaper's owners, John S. Knight. His protests helped move Marlette temporarily from the editorial page to another page, where he was less likely to be seen as the voice of the Observer.

Marlette later drew for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and New York Newsday before leaving the limelight to work in Tallahassee, Fla., and Tulsa.

"He liked to say he wanted his cartoons to hit people in the gut, not just in the brain, and I think he achieved that as frequently as any cartoonist," said Jim Klurfeld, vice president and editor of the editorial section at Newsday.

Marlette took on religion and politics with equal fervor, pillorying evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and countless politicians. Cartoons about the Bakkers and their PTL ministry in Charlotte won Marlette the Pulitzer in 1988.

"He was a spiritual guy who read a great deal about religion and theology and sought to practice it in his daily life," Observer writer Richard Maschal said. "He didn't stand apart from the South and condemn it, but loved it. And anytime he criticized it, it was from the heart."

Marlette received national attention in 2002 with a Tallahassee Democrat cartoon depicting an Arab driving a Ryder truck with a nuclear bomb and the caption, "What Would Mohammed Drive?"

When readers protested, Marlette wrote, "We don't need constitutional protection to run boring, inoffensive cartoons. We don't need constitutional protection to make money from advertising. We don't need constitutional protection to tell readers exactly what they want to hear. We need constitutional protection for our right to express unpopular views."

Marlette's cartoons consistently won awards, and the "Kudzu" strip -- featuring hero Kudzu DuBose and egotistical preacher the Rev. Will B. Dunn -- was syndicated in newspapers worldwide, including The News & Observer. Several weeks of strips already have been drawn, and "Kudzu's" syndicate had no word Tuesday on the future of the strip.

Bland Simpson, who as a member of the Red Clay Ramblers band collaborated with Marlette on the "Kudzu" musical, said Marlette "held everybody to a high standard of truth-telling and accountability."

Marlette's first novel, "The Bridge," was given a fiction award by the Southeast Booksellers Association in 2002. But it also caused resentment in the North Carolina literary community. One of the nation's top authors of literary fiction, Allan Gurganus, who also lives in Hillsborough, was hurt by a character in "The Bridge" who apparently was modeled after him, and not in a flattering way. Some of Gurganus' friends in the book world rallied against Marlette.

Marlette published a second novel, "Magic Time," last year, and he was about to begin bookstore readings to promote its paperback release. He was to appear in Raleigh in August.

It was at a reading of "Magic Time" in Oxford several months ago that Marlette learned of the local high school's plan to stage the "Kudzu" musical at the acclaimed Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Tom and Dorothy Howorth, whose daughter is on the play's technical crew, attended the reading and told Marlette.

Marlette was immediately enthusiastic, and asked Simpson and Jack Herrick, another member of the Ramblers, to help him revise and shorten the play. Marlette, his wife and Herrick spent four days with the Howorths about three weeks ago to work on the musical.

"He was an incredibly generous guy," Tom Howorth said. "This was all for the kids and to make the production as good as it could be."

Oxford High Principal Bill Hovious said he visited Davenport in the hospital, where the teacher was being treated for a broken leg. He said Davenport was "probably an emotional wreck right now."

Hovious said the students in the play are upset, but he suspected they will still stage it in Scotland. "I think they will put on the best performance of 'Kudzu' that anybody has ever seen," he said.

Marlette leaves behind his wife and one son, Jackson, who is studying art in France. Funeral arrangements are pending.

(Staff writers Carolina Astigarraga and Sapna Maheshwari, and Charlotte Observer writers Peter St. Onge and Jeri Krentz, contributed to this report.)