Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography | David Michaelis | I will never look at Snoopy the same way

Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography | David Michaelis | Great Read

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Schulz and Peanuts...

	Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography David Michaelis Harper, 2007 - 672 pages average customer review:based on 83 reviews view larger image
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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.

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I will never look at Snoopy the same way

As a life-long admirer of Peanuts, I could not put this book down. I found it at times profound, highly readable and full of insight. The use of the strip to illustrate the biographical material was masterful. David Michaelis has come under fire from the Schulz family, especially Charles Schulz's son Monte for his depiction of "Sparky" as a depressed artist, as well as dwelling on Schulz's late 60s love affair. But Monte Schulz's criticisms are unfair. Michaelis creates a portrait, his own, of both the artist and the meaning of the strip. That is all he can do. Truth is multifarious and memory, even among family members, is fluid as quicksilver.

Michaelis does an admirable job of charting the thematic metamorphosis of Peanuts, from its early emphasis on the angst-ridden Charlie Brown to the later ecstatic id-antics of Snoopy. While not a work of art history, the biography makes a good companion to the Complete Peanuts volumes, revealing many subterranean currents of meaning. For Schulz to endure as the great artist and writer that he was, critical and serious works like this need to be read, even when people might not like what Michaelis has to say. For this reviewer, Schulz and Peanuts enriched my understanding of characters I have loved all my life, allowing me to appreciate them even more.

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Great Read

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.

not surprising

That Schultz had a bleak and cynical view of life is not surprising to those who followed his earlier (better) strips. I was a huge fan of Peanuts as a boy and I am not disappointed in what I learned from this book. In the end, Charles Schultz comes off as a ......man.

Hadn't thought about it

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.

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Informative and fascinating, but ultimately a one dimensional portrait

This examination of Schulz's life is done with heavy emphasis on how that life was reflected in his life's work, PEANUTS. By juxtaposing cartoons with different events in Schulz's life, Michaelis presents a man who cannot be separated from his work; that the bond between life and art was inseparable and through careful reading of the strip, you can chart the course of Schulz's emotional ups and downs. This is the premise on which Michaelis bases his biography and it makes for reading that is often compelling but perhaps overreaches. It seems to limit the scope of the biography considering Micahelis' unlimited access and he often bogs down into psychoanalyzing when a more straight forward approach would have been preferable. Upon finishing this book, the first thing I thought was, "I doubt the Schulz family enjoyed this." Schulz comes across as a bitter man, who never was able to enjoy his accomplishments; often petty and self-involved, he could be vindictive and passive aggressive. While I don't think that Michaelis completely missed his mark; many artists fit this same personality type, it just doesn't seem he has created a well- rounded portrait. Perhaps Schulz was this cut off from the world, wrapped up in his creation to the extent where all else suffered. But Michaelis' Schulz is too one dimensional to have created such an incredibly insightful and reflective work on a weekly basis. This Schulz seems to have found very little joy in life and that person does not seem to have the inner being to create this wonderful comic. I would have loved to see a better discussion of the process of creation and a deeper examination of Schulz'sthought processes. But biographies can rarely fulfill all the needs of the readers and I do feel that Michaelis has created an interesting if incomplete portrait of Charles Schulz, creator of one of the most beloved and influential strips ever.

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