By Paul Carrier
It’s no exaggeration to say that several generations of people grew up with Peanuts, the comic strip Charles Schulz launched in 1950 and continued until the day before his death in 2000. Over the years, Peanuts made the transition to big and small screens, the stage, product endorsements, and countless forms of merchandising, including plush Snoopy dolls. The strip itself is still around, in reruns and anthologies.
Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Woodstock and the rest of the gang remain beloved characters, easily recognizable icons of American pop culture. But what of Charles Monroe Schulz, the genius who created them all and released them into the world?
Peanuts fans may believe they know little about the legendary cartoonist. But as David Michaelis makes clear in Schulz and Peanuts, an exhaustive and provocative biography, readers familiar with Schulz’s work do, in fact, have more than a passing familiarity with the man himself, because the strip was so heavily autobiographical.
Peanuts did not literally track Schulz’s life, but his temperament, values and outlook permeate the comic. Read the strip closely enough and you’ll come away with a pretty good sense of what made Schulz tick, and how his life changed over the years.
Michaelis, who also has written a biography of famed illustrator N. C. Wyeth, makes it clear throughout Schulz and Peanuts that Sparky, as Schulz was known, mined his own quirks, as well as his life’s successes, failures, joys and frustrations, to breathe life into his creations.
Time and time again, Michaelis details some important development in Schulz’s life, or an aspect of his personality, that the book illustrates with a remarkably pertinent Peanuts strip, dozens of which are scattered throughout the text for just that purpose.
Charlie Brown may not be Charles Schulz’s doppelganger, but they do bear a striking resemblance. As a boy, the shy, introverted and highly sensitive Schulz felt misunderstood. He nursed grievances, found it difficult to talk to pretty girls and had what Michaelis calls a “lifelong sense of aloneness and incompleteness.” Schulz and his first wife, Joyce, were often likened to Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt. Even as a husband (during his first marriage) and father, Schulz felt unloved. He appears to have been melancholy throughout his life.
In other words, Schulz’s travails were a lot like those of a certain big-headed, round-faced kid with a zigzag on his shirt. And the taken-from-life roots of the comic strip did not end there. Schulz claimed to have given his wishy-washy ways to Charlie Brown, his sarcasm to Lucy, his dignity to Linus, his perfectionism to Schroeder, and his sense of being unappreciated to Snoopy.
Shermy, an early Peanuts character, is named after Schulz’s childhood friend, Sherman Plepler. Snoopy was inspired by the young Schulz’s pet pooch, Spike. The tiny bird Woodstock resents being called Shorty, a demeaning moniker that some kid gave Schulz when he was a sophomore in high school. As for the famed Little Red-Haired Girl, she had a real-life counterpart as well.
Still, the comparisons only go so far. Michaelis leaves no doubt that Schulz was a far more complex, even contradictory, man than his avuncular public image suggested. He suffered from panic attacks as an adult, for example, and reached a point where he was reluctant to take trips that kept him away from home overnight. As a result, he sometimes canceled scheduled appearances at the last minute if they would have required traveling long distances.
Highly intelligent and well-read, Schulz liked to portray himself as simple and ordinary. Raised in a secular home, he became an evangelical Christian as a young man, but later embraced a more liberal, humanistic faith. Deeply protective of the Peanuts characters, he nonetheless allowed them to be used in commercial ventures, from Ford ads to nicely packaged collections of aphorisms that arguably presented the strip's cast members as much more saccharine than they were in their original newspaper format. Made famous and wealthy by a strip starring children, Schulz was not especially fond of kids (other than his own) and could be misanthropic.
Schulz and Peanuts will appeal to devoted fans of the classic strip and, more generally, to students of the genre’s history. But in a larger sense, this psychologically probing biography is an insightful look at a man who knew what he wanted from childhood, persevered until he succeeded, and then stuck with it for half a century. Eventually, Peanuts ran in 2,600 newspapers in 21 languages, attracting 300 million readers from 75 countries.
It was Schulz’s uncle who nicknamed his newborn nephew Spark Plug (later shortened to Sparky) back in 1922, after a horse in the Barney Google comic strip. So perhaps it could be argued that Schulz was destined for a life in “the funny papers” from the get-go. Yet as deserving as Schulz is of a close look at his life and psyche, the art was more compelling than the artist. At 566 pages, Schulz and Peanuts could have used tighter editing, to trim it to a more manageable length.
Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Woodstock and the rest of the gang remain beloved characters, easily recognizable icons of American pop culture. But what of Charles Monroe Schulz, the genius who created them all and released them into the world?
Peanuts fans may believe they know little about the legendary cartoonist. But as David Michaelis makes clear in Schulz and Peanuts, an exhaustive and provocative biography, readers familiar with Schulz’s work do, in fact, have more than a passing familiarity with the man himself, because the strip was so heavily autobiographical.
Peanuts did not literally track Schulz’s life, but his temperament, values and outlook permeate the comic. Read the strip closely enough and you’ll come away with a pretty good sense of what made Schulz tick, and how his life changed over the years.
Michaelis, who also has written a biography of famed illustrator N. C. Wyeth, makes it clear throughout Schulz and Peanuts that Sparky, as Schulz was known, mined his own quirks, as well as his life’s successes, failures, joys and frustrations, to breathe life into his creations.
Time and time again, Michaelis details some important development in Schulz’s life, or an aspect of his personality, that the book illustrates with a remarkably pertinent Peanuts strip, dozens of which are scattered throughout the text for just that purpose.
Charlie Brown may not be Charles Schulz’s doppelganger, but they do bear a striking resemblance. As a boy, the shy, introverted and highly sensitive Schulz felt misunderstood. He nursed grievances, found it difficult to talk to pretty girls and had what Michaelis calls a “lifelong sense of aloneness and incompleteness.” Schulz and his first wife, Joyce, were often likened to Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt. Even as a husband (during his first marriage) and father, Schulz felt unloved. He appears to have been melancholy throughout his life.
In other words, Schulz’s travails were a lot like those of a certain big-headed, round-faced kid with a zigzag on his shirt. And the taken-from-life roots of the comic strip did not end there. Schulz claimed to have given his wishy-washy ways to Charlie Brown, his sarcasm to Lucy, his dignity to Linus, his perfectionism to Schroeder, and his sense of being unappreciated to Snoopy.
Shermy, an early Peanuts character, is named after Schulz’s childhood friend, Sherman Plepler. Snoopy was inspired by the young Schulz’s pet pooch, Spike. The tiny bird Woodstock resents being called Shorty, a demeaning moniker that some kid gave Schulz when he was a sophomore in high school. As for the famed Little Red-Haired Girl, she had a real-life counterpart as well.
Still, the comparisons only go so far. Michaelis leaves no doubt that Schulz was a far more complex, even contradictory, man than his avuncular public image suggested. He suffered from panic attacks as an adult, for example, and reached a point where he was reluctant to take trips that kept him away from home overnight. As a result, he sometimes canceled scheduled appearances at the last minute if they would have required traveling long distances.
Highly intelligent and well-read, Schulz liked to portray himself as simple and ordinary. Raised in a secular home, he became an evangelical Christian as a young man, but later embraced a more liberal, humanistic faith. Deeply protective of the Peanuts characters, he nonetheless allowed them to be used in commercial ventures, from Ford ads to nicely packaged collections of aphorisms that arguably presented the strip's cast members as much more saccharine than they were in their original newspaper format. Made famous and wealthy by a strip starring children, Schulz was not especially fond of kids (other than his own) and could be misanthropic.
Schulz and Peanuts will appeal to devoted fans of the classic strip and, more generally, to students of the genre’s history. But in a larger sense, this psychologically probing biography is an insightful look at a man who knew what he wanted from childhood, persevered until he succeeded, and then stuck with it for half a century. Eventually, Peanuts ran in 2,600 newspapers in 21 languages, attracting 300 million readers from 75 countries.
It was Schulz’s uncle who nicknamed his newborn nephew Spark Plug (later shortened to Sparky) back in 1922, after a horse in the Barney Google comic strip. So perhaps it could be argued that Schulz was destined for a life in “the funny papers” from the get-go. Yet as deserving as Schulz is of a close look at his life and psyche, the art was more compelling than the artist. At 566 pages, Schulz and Peanuts could have used tighter editing, to trim it to a more manageable length.
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