Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14253 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Released on: 2007-10-16
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 672 pages

Amazon.com
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

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. For all the joy Charlie Brown and the gang gave readers over half a century, their creator, Charles Schulz, was a profoundly unhappy man. It's widely known that he hated the name Peanuts, which was foisted on the strip by his syndicate. But Michaelis (N.C. Wyeth: A Biography), given access to family, friends and personal papers, reveals the full extent of Schulz's depression, tracing its origins in his Minnesota childhood, with parents reluctant to encourage his artistic dreams and yearbook editors who scrapped his illustrations without explanation. Nearly 250 Peanuts strips are woven into the biography, demonstrating just how much of his life story Schulz poured into the cartoon. In one sequence, Snoopy's crush on a girl dog is revealed as a barely disguised retelling of the artist's extramarital affair. Michaelis is especially strong in recounting Schulz's artistic development, teasing out the influences on his unique characterization of children. And Michaelis makes plain the full impact of Peanuts' first decades and how much it puzzled and unnerved other cartoonists. This is a fascinating account of an artist who devoted his life to his work in the painful belief that it was all he had. 16 pages of b&w photos; 240 b&w comic strips throughout. (Oct. 16)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
David Michaelis’s book, the first full-scale biography of Charles Schulz, is almost as universally adored as his subject’s comic strips. The former biographer of N. C. Wyeth (whose son Andrew was a hero of Schulz’s) takes on America’s best-known cartoonist, drawing on exclusive access to Schulz’s papers and interviews with nearly every living Schulz acquaintance. Erring on the side of inclusion, the book sometimes seems too rich with detail, and one reviewer faults Michaelis’s focus on Schulz’s gloomier side (a criticism that Schulz’s own daughter has made about the book). Otherwise, reviewers are riveted by the revelatory correspondences between Schulz’s groundbreaking work and the man who brought it to life.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

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.

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.

A staggeringly detailed biography of America's most beloved cartoonist
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.