Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
by David Michaelis
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Book Summary Information
Author: David MichaelisEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2007-10-01
ISBN: 0641863454
Number of pages: 672
Publisher: Harper
Book Reviews of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
Book Review: Unsparing look at a master of the comic form
Summary: 5 Stars
Author David Michaelis peels back the myth of the last of the good guys, Peanuts author Charles Schulz, in this sometimes harrowing portrait. Michaelis follows Schulz from his childhood in Minnesota through his meteoric career as the author of over 17000 Peanuts strips to his death in 2000. This is not a book for those who prefer their
heroes sugar-coated; and as Michaelis shows, even good guys stumble.
The picture we are shown is not often pretty and occasionally downright ugly. Schulz always saw himself as a rejected loner, but this stance is often at odds with his youthful skills, as when he organized raucous neighbor hockey games. Often it seems as if Schulz has rejected the world, then berates the world because he feels lonely. This sense of self-pity follows him into his adulthood, with the added twist that Schulz learned to use it to get attention.
But "Schulz and Peanuts" is not all about the man's peculiar personality. With nearly monomaniacal will he worked hard as a young man to perfect his craft, learning through the Art Instruction company before landing a job as instuctor. We see where Schulz picked up the names and themes for his characters -- Charlie Brown's name from a co-worker; Snoopy's from a dog he never got to own; CB's striped shirts from his own 50s wear; his interiors from the spare, modern style of 1950s California. We learn of Schulz's cool, distant parents and for his desperate desire for their love. We follow him through romances and marriage and his cool, distant form of parenting. And we see his life reflected in the incredible strip that was his refuge from the difficulties of life. Michaelis paints Peanuts as an overwhelmingly beloved strip, and only hints at the outside world's critiques. Schulz, for instance, squeezed Peanuts most unbecomingly for everything it was worth, garnering ad deals (for Ford and Metlife among many others) and licensing fees that brought him unimagined wealth. Some may consider that his strips had reached its peak by the early 60s. But Michaelis raises these critiques only peripherally. The focus "Schulz and Peanuts" is mainly on the strip's creator, and his virtues and foibles. But in spite of his very human faults, when the book ended, there was a sense of sadness at his passing.
The triumph of Charles Schulz is that a man who went through life with a sense of personal unworthiness was able to parlay that deficiency into undying fame, the love of millions and undreamed of wealth. A tough story to hear, but a fascinating true telling that honors its subject without being cloying.
Summary of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography
Charles M. Schulz, the most widely syndicated and beloved cartoonist of all time, is also one of the least understood figures in American culture. Now acclaimed biographer David Michaelis gives us the first full-length biography of the brilliant, unseen man behind Peanuts: at once a creation story, a portrait of a native genius, and a chronicle contrasting the private man with the central role he played in shaping the national imagination.
It is the most American of stories: How a barber's son grew up from modest beginnings to realize his dream of creating a newspaper comic strip. How he daringly chose themes never before attempted in mainstream cartoons?loneliness, isolation, melancholy, the unending search for love?always lightening the darker side with laughter and mingling the old-fashioned sweetness of childhood with a very adult and modern awareness of the bitterness of life. And how, using a lighthearted, loving touch, a crow-quill pen dipped in ink, and a cast of memorable characters, he portrayed the struggles that come with being awkward, imperfect, human.
With Peanuts, Schulz profoundly influenced America in the second half of the twentieth century. But the humorous strip was anchored in the collective experience and hardships of the artist's generation?the generation that survived the Great Depression, liberated Europe and the Pacific, and came home to build the prosperous postwar world. Michaelis masterfully weaves Schulz's story with the cartoons that are so familiar to us, revealing how so much more of his life was part of the strip than we ever knew.
Based on years of research, including exclusive interviews with the cartoonist's family, friends, and colleagues, unprecedented access to his studio and business archives, and new caches of personal letters and drawings, Schulz and Peanuts is the definitive epic biography of an American icon and the unforgettable characters he created.
Amazon Significant Seven, October 2007: There's no book this year that made people's eyes light up when I told them about it more than Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis's new biography of cartoonist Charles Schulz. (And when they saw the obvious-but-brilliant Chip Kidd-designed cover, their eyes got even brighter.) Everyone, it seems, feels a personal connection to Peanuts (a name, by the way, that Schulz always hated), but few have a sense of the artist whose small troupe of big-headed characters still lives at the center of our imagination. If some mystery about the man still remains after reading Michaelis's sharp, engaging, and level-headed biography that's no fault of the biographer--in fact, it's to his credit. Michaelis parses Schulz's particular combination of Midwestern reserve and steely determination and the strip's still-surprising balance of exuberance and misery, and he reminds us what a colossal cultural force it became, especially in the 1960s. But even as he ingeniously finds sources for Schulz's four-panel vignettes in the events of his biography, he recognizes that the true, sometimes inexplicable drama of his life took place when he sat down every day for 50 years to trace Linus's wobbly strands of hair, fill in Snoopy's black nose, and, time and again, letter the words "Good grief." --Tom Nissley
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