Review: "N.C. Wyeth: A Biography," by David Michaelis

By Paul Carrier

He may be less celebrated in our time than son Andrew and grandson Jamie. But Newell Convers Wyeth was arguably the most famous and admired illustrator of the 20th century, thanks to works that appeared in books, magazines, advertisements and other venues.

Reproductions of N.C. Wyeth's paintings and illustrations are readily available in book form, but to the best of my knowledge, there's only one full-length biography of the artist. For that reason, and because of author David Michaelis’ exhaustive research, his nuanced 1998 examination of Wyeth’s life remains compelling and authoritative two decades after its publication.

N.C. Wyeth: A Biography clocks in at 430 pages, not counting a genealogy of Wyeth’s paternal and maternal lines, more than 70 pages of notes, a 19-page bibliography and six pages of acknowledgements. But Michaelis’ thoroughness pays off with a wealth of detail about both the chronology of Wyeth’s life and his state of mind along the way.

Raised in Needham, Mass., Wyeth was the oldest of four sons born to Newell Wyeth and Henrietta (Hattie) Zirngiebel. His mother encouraged his artistic pursuits as a boy, and Wyeth had an especially close relationship with her.

That changed for a time when the self-absorbed and possibly mentally ill Hattie, a suffocating force in the lives of her four sons, grew resentful of Wyeth’s decision to marry. But Wyeth’s devotion to his mother resurfaced soon enough. Those ties, coupled with an overpowering nostalgia for the Needham of his youth, remained obsessive focal points of his life.

One of the strengths of N.C. Wyeth is the generous use of artwork and family photos to complement the text. Another is Michaelis’ success in chronicling the complexity of his subject’s ever-evolving relationships with those closest to him, including his parents; Carolyn Bockius, whom Wyeth eventually married; and Howard Pyle, the famed illustrator who accepted Wyeth as a student at his Delaware-based school of art.

Michaelis also devotes considerable attention to the central conflict in Wyeth’s professional life: his preoccupation with elevating his work from what he viewed as mere illustration to the higher plane of fine art.

“The more successful he became as an illustrator, the more he discriminated between pictures painted to illustrate texts and pictures painted for exhibition,” Michaelis writes. “The more popular N.C. Wyeth became, the less he seemed to count as a real artist.”

Michaelis approaches his subject with the same astute powers of observation and analysis that the biographer displayed, years later, in Schulz and Peanuts, his 2007 biography of the legendary cartoonist who created one of the most beloved comic strips of all time.

The author has plenty to work with. Wyeth was bighearted bur secretive, outgoing but conflicted, an ambitious artist who sold himself short. Not only was the often-depressed (and never treated) Wyeth alternately proud of his work and disgusted by it, but he felt intellectually superior to his wife, conflicted about Pyle, and suspicious of anything that smacked of change. He was, for many years, perennially wedded to an idealized vision of Needham as something akin to paradise.

The ultimate homebody, Wyeth was clannish and devoted to his family. Michaelis gives the Wyeths’ brood of children their due. All five of them — sons Andrew and Nat and daughters Henriette, Ann and Carolyn — were talented, fascinating people in their own right.

Andrew's star eventually shone brighter than those of his siblings, of course. In fact, N.C. lived to see the son eclipse the father. Over time, N.C. came to be viewed more and more as the father of Andrew, rather than as the dean of American illustration.

Still, N.C. took great pride in his son’s success and growing reputation, which was well-established by the time N.C. and his very young grandson died in 1945, when an oncoming train plowed into N.C.’s car at a railroad crossing in Pennsylvania. The artist was 62 years old.

Shortly before N.C.’s death, Andrew, who worshipped his father, tried to bolster N.C.’s appreciation of his own legacy. “I told him that he didn’t realize what he had done," Michaelis quotes Andrew as saying. "He’d reached a pinnacle in illustration that would live forever. And I hoped that he would not look down on it.” N.C. was moved, but Michaelis notes that this great talent, so long at war with himself, “did not — could not — agree.”

Review: "Schulz and Peanuts," David Michaelis

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.