Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography

Like most people, I hadn't really given any thought to the personal life of Sparky while he wrote the Peanuts strip. It was sort of interesting to find out that Lucy was essentially his first wife, and that the character mellowed after they divorced. We've all heard about tortured artists and how they had to suffer for their art; that there's an inverse ratio between art and suffering. e.g., more suffering, better art, less suffering, art not as good. Still, I didn't think it had to be that way, but apparently that's how it worked with Sparky. I also thought it was interesting that the author saw him perhaps not so much depressed as romantically disappointed, and it was nice to know that he eventually found a woman he could be happy with towards the last part of his life -- along with becoming adept at flirting, and actually becoming more handsome as he got older, as some of us do. One reviewer said you could find this stuff on the internet, and maybe that's true, but I wouldn't have thought to do so, so I never would have learned about him, presumably, without this book.

This biography seems to be very exhaustive and was a great read. I would liked to have learned more about the business side of Peanuts, but besides that nothing is missing from this very fair biography.

Charles Schulz's Peanuts is the most famous comic strip ever penned. Here in this biography David Michaelis meticulously builds a portrait of the man behind the drawings. Born to a German immigrant family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Charles Schulz, dubbed "Sparky" from birth, grew up a shy, gawky kid, never sure of having his strong-willed mother's love, admiring pretty female schoolmates from afar. From an early age, though, he knew what he wanted to do with his life, and his ambition stayed undimmed through Army service and art school, until at last his comic strip "L'il Folk" was picked up by, if not "a big Eastern syndicate," at least a syndicate.

One might say the rest is history, except that success hardly came overnight. Chief among the book's many strengths is Michaelis' vivid chronicle of Schulz' long climb to the top. He brings the cartoonist to compelling life as the complex personality he undoubtedly was. Frequently pathologically shy with women, Charles Schulz nevertheless had two attractive, talented wives and carried on several other romances (one, apparently, while he was still married). Though the artist frequently deprecated his own talent he was at the same time fiercely proud of it: the author recounts more than one incident of Schulz' frigid reaction to ideas from friends and family for the strip, and his insistence that all of the ideas and incidents in "Peanuts" were of his own invention. To the very end of his life Schulz drew "Peanuts" entirely himself; and when he was finally forced to retire by his fatal cancer he died the very day the strip announcing his retirement appeared.

Of course, the many quotations of actual strips add to a reader's pleasure; it is not taking anything away from the author's work to say that the book would be noticeably less enjoyable without these. Michaelis makes points about how the characters and incidents in the strips reflect the cartoonist's real life mostly with conviction. It is interesting, too, to see how much Schulz's drawing style evolved over the decades--some indication of the chronology involved would have been welcome.

The negative reactions from Schulz' immediate family members, and in particular his first wife Joyce, to their portrayals in "Schulz and Peanuts" have been well publicized. Their anger is understandable--it must be a strange and painful experience to see one's own family's tensions and foibles documented in print, nor can any outsider have witnessed the many days of ordinary happiness that even a dysfunctional family experiences (and Schulz' family was hardly dysfunctional by most standards). Conversely, however, no one can truly see themselves as the outside world sees them. "Schulz and Peanuts" succeeds because Michaelis ultimately convinces the outside world, in the person of the reader, that his is a valid portrait of the real man behind one of America's true cultural phenomena.

I thought this book was an enjoyable read. It has quite a bit of information and does a good job painting the picture of Schulz as a melancholy man. However, I don't think it was written as well as it could have been. I found the organization a little off and some details were not adequately explained. For all the people's lives that he touched, I think the book could have done a better job of capturing what Schulz meant to so many people. The book also ends abruptly when Schulz dies, but I think a more thorough wrap-up should have been provided - as well as what has happened since 2000, since the Peanuts story continues...

Charles Shulz was a very interesting fellow and a borderline psycho. The book tells you all about it in an interesting book. *However* .... the book is HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of pages long and there was so much more detail than I was interested in. This would be a great 90 page book. Never could finish it even though I tried.