Review by Choice Review
Michaelis interweaves this fascinating biography of Charles Schulz with examples from his famous Peanuts strip, which echoed people and events in his life. The book benefits from a clear writing style, exhaustive research, and the author's unprecedented access to the cartoonist's family, friends, colleagues, business, and archives. But some of these strengths also lead to serious flaws: a proneness to gossip and stereotypes; overstatement, exaggeration, and overuse of literary license; delving into the mind of Schulz without the necessary psychoanalytical skills; inferring too much from Schulz's casual statements; assuming too much about the impact of his early life on his sense of being and career. Schulz's family and friends have challenged some of Michaelis's contentions and the overall tone of the book, pointing out publicly that the author's frame of reference was skewed and that some useful material provided by sources close to Schulz was either omitted or used with inferential twists that resulted in misjudgments and factual errors. Because of the wide-ranging appeal of Schulz and Peanuts, this book deserves a broad readership--one that keeps in mind that, contrary to the publisher's claim, this is not the "definitive" biography. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. All readers, all levels. J. A. Lent Temple University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
TOWARD the end of his life Charles Schulz, the creator of "Peanuts," wished he were Andrew Wyeth. What Wyeth did was fine art, he grumbled, while he was just a newspaper cartoonist, a draftsman, whose work would surely not last. In fact, "Peanuts" is still read, in anthologies and compilations, by many more people than ever looked at a Wyeth, and Schulz's was arguably the greater talent. He transformed the newspaper cartoon strip, busy and cluttered by the time he turned up in the late '40s, by flooding it with white space, and by reducing his childish characters to near abstraction - huge circular heads balanced on tiny bodies - he rendered them far more expressive than their cartoon peers. The strip was able to register grown-up emotions, like anxiety, depression, yearning, disillusionment, that had never been in cartoons before. Instead of the "Slam!" "Bam!" "Pow!" sound effects that were the lingua franca of the comics, it employed a quieter, more eloquent vocabulary: "Aaugh!" and "Sigh." "Peanuts" was beloved by everyone: by hipsters and college kids (in the '60s especially); by presidents (Ronald Reagan once wrote Schulz a fan note, saying he identified with Charlie Brown) ; by the Apollo 10 astronauts, who named their orbiter and landing vehicle after Charlie and Snoopy; by ministers and pastors, who read moral and theological lessons into the strip; by the suits in Detroit, who paid Charlie and the gang a small fortune to shill for the Ford Falcon. At its peak the strip reached 300 million readers in 75 countries; 2,600 papers and 21 languages every day. The various animated TV specials continue to top the Nielsen charts whenever they're broadcast, and the musical "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," after selling out for four years off Broadway, is now a staple of high school and amateur theater productions - the most-produced musical ever. The success of the strip, together with its spinoffs and an almost unending flood of cheesy "Peanuts" ware - calendars, bedsheets, wastebaskets, lunchboxes, "Warm Puppy" coffee mugs and the like - made Schulz an immensely wealthy man, rich enough to build his own ice rink. In the '80s he was one of the 10 highest-paid entertainers in America, right up there with Oprah and Michael Jackson. In fact, if by artist we mean someone who paints or draws, it's no stretch at all to say that Charles Schulz was the most popular and most successful American artist who ever lived. He was also, to judge from David Michaelis's new biography, one of the loneliest and most unhappy. We should have guessed, for as Michaelis points out, "Peanuts" was almost transparently autobiographical. There really was an unattainable Little Red-Haired Girl. Her name was Donna Mae Johnson, and she jilted Schulz in July 1950; he nursed the rejection, along with all the other slights he suffered from wished-for girlfriends, for the rest of his life. Charlie Brown, wishy-washy, disillusioned, but also secretly ambitious, was the artist himself, of course; and so were Linus, the oddball; Schroeder, meticulous and gifted; and, above all, Snoopy, with his daydreams, his fantasies, his sense of being undervalued and misunderstood. Violet, with her mean streak; and Lucy, bossy, impatient and sarcastic, were all the controlling, withholding women in Schulz's life, especially his mother and his first wife, Joyce. Michaelis also goes in for a certain amount of psychologizing, but once you have the key it hardly seems necessary. Michaelis's last book was an exceptionally good biography of N.C. Wyeth (Andrew's father), and his task here is both easier and harder. Wyeth was the practitioner of a dying, minor art form - he was the last of the great painterly illustrators - and if that earlier book had a weakness, it was that Michaelis barely bothered to explain why he deserved a full-length treatment. In the case of his Schulz biography, the importance of the subject almost goes without saying (though the author is at frequent pains to remind us, even so). Schulz was what so many lesser figures are carelessly said to be: a genuine American icon, who in his unassuming way deeply imprinted our culture. On the other hand, N.C. Wyeth lived a large, big-themed life, with a tragic, Dreiser-ish subplot for good measure. (In his 60s, he became obsessed with one of his daughters-in-law and died in a railroad-crossing collision - probably by accident, but possibly by intention - with her son, his grandson, at his side.) Schulz's much longer life (1922-2000) was, by comparison, bland and eventless - or at least the part that wasn't lived inside his head, and except for the strip, he left few clues as to what was going on in there. Though he was one of the first to introduce psychological themes into cartooning, with Lucy and her sidewalk psychiatric-help booth, he was himself stubbornly unanalytical. His nature was as much a puzzle to him as it was to everyone else. "It took me a long time to become a human being," he told a magazine interviewer in 1987. People who knew Schulz always called him Sparky, the nickname given him at birth by an uncle, who shortened it from Spark Plug, the name of a woebegone race horse just recently introduced into the popular Barney Google comic strip. It was an almost comically inappropriate handle - there was nothing in the least scintillating about the young Sparky, who was small, shy, geeky - and also a fateful one, linking him to what from a very early age he determined to be his life work: to produce a syndicated daily comic strip. Not that there were many signs he had a gift for it, or for anything else. Schulz was born and - except for a weird and awful two-year stint the family endured in the California desert - grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of the Twin Cities. His father, who was born in Germany and grew up with German-speaking parents, ran a barber shop (just like Charlie Brown's dad). His mother, who never got beyond third grade, came from a clannish, depressive, hard-drinking Norwegian farm family and was one of those people who feel inadequate and superior at the same time. According to Michaelis, she could be distant, cool, even mocking and scornful, and he blames her for most of Sparky's woes, especially his lifelong feeling of being insufficiently loved. Schulz was raised in what sounds like a grim, even more isolated version of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon - a close-knit place ruled by church and family, where book learning was regarded with suspicion and where, far from being above average, children were discouraged from thinking too highly of themselves. Early in grammar school, Schulz was bumped ahead a grade, which guaranteed that for the rest of his school career he would always be the smallest, skinniest, most awkward kid in the class. Though a decent pickup hockey player, and a good enough golfer to play No. 2 on the school team, by the time he got to high school Schulz was so crippled with shyness he had become virtually invisible. "I wasn't actually hated," he said later. "Nobody cared that much." His one chance for distinction was lost when some cartoons he had drawn for the school yearbook were unaccountably turned down - a rejection he never forgave, just as he never forgave all the girls who failed to notice that he had worshiped them from afar. After graduation, Schulz's shyness and insecurity rendered art school out of the question, so instead he took a correspondence course from Art Instruction Inc., the kind of place that used to advertise on the back of matchbooks. (He found the instruction so helpful that he eventually joined the faculty himself and years later went on the board.) In 1942 Schulz was drafted and, heartsick and terrified, left for boot camp only days after his mother had died. But he actually thrived in the Army and came back newly confident. He even began to go out with girls - though his idea of an appropriate dating present was a Bible. (All his life Schulz was the straightest of arrows: he didn't smoke, swear or drink, on the grounds that neither did Jesus. The wine at Cana, the young Sparky used to claim, was nonalcoholic.) In 1951, Schulz married Joyce Halverson, a 22-year-old divorcée with a young daughter from an ill-advised and short-lived marriage to a cowboy. He arranged to adopt the daughter, Meredith, and afterward always insisted she was his, even when the teenage Meredith began to poke around and ask nosy questions. To some degree it was probably a marriage of convenience on both sides, but for a while it was happy enough, and the Schutzes went on to have four children of their own. Sparky was an indifferent and often inattentive father and husband, though, because, self-absorbed and secretly harboring immense ambition, he was really married to his work. After a lot of rejections and false starts, he finally landed a weekly strip, called "Li'l Folks," with the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and it was syndicated in 1950 by United Feature, which insisted that the title be changed to "Peanuts." Schulz hated the name but went along, adding this to his ever-growing list of grudges. Schulz had initially dreamed of an action strip but began drawing children because that's what seemed to sell. The earliest strips hit what now seems the authentic Schulzian emotional tone - "Yes, sir! Good ol' Charlie Brown. ... How I hate him!" - but it took a while for the drawing to evolve, for the heads to enlarge, the limbs to shrink. "Peanuts" grew slowly at first; caught on hugely in the '60s, when almost by accident it seemed to speak to everyone who was experiencing the generation gap; and then almost drowned in a licensing binge and flood of tchotchkes. Schulz said yes to everything, no matter how kitschy - toys, cards, books, sweatshirts - until even his fans began to complain he was selling out. What saved "Peanuts," Michaelis suggests, was the elevation of Snoopy into a main character in the late '60s, and the way his boundless, almost surreal fantasy life frequently took over the strip, which at the same time was being pared down to a visual minimum: a scarf, a helmet, a doghouse indicated by just a few horizontal lines. Another thing that didn't hurt was the gradual souring of the Schulz marriage. The family was living in Southern California by now, on a sort of private Disneyland with its own stables and miniature golf course and the ice rink (where Schulz like to hold court in the Warm Puppy snack bar) nearby. Despite his success, Schulz was prickly, lonely, depressed and increasingly subject to panic attacks; Joyce felt overburdened and underappreciated. Their feuds, their long bouts of coldness, inspired some of the most Thurber-like stretches of "Peanuts" - the strips where Charlie and Lucy seem to be locked in the eternal struggle of male and female, with the latter always wielding the upper hand. As Schulz grew into middle age, he filled out, stopped wearing his hair in a buzz cut and discovered that he was actually attractive to women. He had one full-fledged affair, and in 1973, a year or so after divorcing Joyce, he married Elizabeth Jean Forsyth, 16 years his junior, whom he had met - where else? - at the ice rink. This second marriage was happier, in large part because Jeannie, as she was known, saw it her job to make it so. Schulz was often moody and withdrawn nevertheless, and was also compulsively flirty. The evidence suggests that his was essentially an arrested sensibility, locked in adolescent longing and self-absorption. But for a certain kind of artist this is not such a bad thing. Kipling and P.G. Wodehouse suffered, or benefited, from much the same condition: like Schulz, they were truly happy only when transported by their work. Schulz said once that if it weren't for cartooning he'd be dead, and indeed he died within days of resigning from the strip because of ill health. IN another way, though, Schulz's is a classic American story: the lonely, misunderstood genius who clings to his dream, finds riches and fame, and discovers that they don't make him happy after all: He was like Gatsby or Citizen Kane. That he chose the comic strip as his medium links him, on the one hand, to such gifted, pioneering and equally misunderstood figures as Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo, and Krazy Kat's George Herriman; and on the other, to current practitioners like R. Crumb, Chris Ware and the graphic novelist who goes by the name Seth, who is currently editing "The Complete Peanuts" for Fantagraphics (and who illustrated this review). These younger artists have a far warier relationship to popular success than Schulz did, but they share his themes of loneliness, of loss, of being unable to connect. Ware's Jimmy Corrigan is in many ways Charlie Brown grown, while still an adolescent, to a premature old age. And Crumb offers a window onto what Schulz might have been like if only he had let the anger out. Michaelis, who had the cooperation of the Schulz family, tells this story brightly and engagingly, if not always succinctly and without repetition. There is rather less than one might expect about the rich tradition of newspaper comics that spawned Schulz, and more than some readers might prefer about, for example, the patterns of metastasis in cervical cancer (the disease that killed Schulz's mother). Throughout the book Michaelis maintains affection for his subject without losing sight of how exasperating and narcissistic he could be. And the smartest thing he has done is to pepper his pages with actual strips from "Peanuts," dozens of them, usually without comment or footnote or even date: an appropriate strip just turns up in the middle of a paragraph that happens to be talking about something similar. Sometimes it's an illustration, sometimes a wry comment. The effect is to continually remind us of why Schulz matters in the first place, and of the potential not just for humor but for feeling and eloquence in the odd and oddly persistent art form where he made his home. Schulz's nature was a puzzle to him. 'It took me a long time to become a human being,' he said in 1987. Charles McGrath, formerly the editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
No other cartoonist tapped the nation's psyche, or touched its heart, like Charles Schulz, who wrote and drew Peanuts for 50 years. While Schulz's gentle humor and endearing characters are what made Peanuts arguably the most beloved comic of all time, it's the strip's psychological insights and underlying melancholy that turned it into enduring art. As Michaelis reveals in this exhaustively researched biography, Schulz's shy, self-effacing exterior hid a complicated, troubled figure who was dogged by overwhelming feelings of inadequacy even as his work appeared in thousands of newspapers worldwide, spawned television and Broadway spin-offs, and generated over $1 billion annually. It's customary for creators to form art from adversity, but Michaelis shows how unhappy incidents from Schulz's childhood would resurface in his strips with a chilling specificity a half-century later; as he once explained, You're drawing mainly memories. Belying his modest demeanor, Schulz remained creative and competitive until the very end: the final Peanuts episode appeared the day after his death in 2000 at age 77. Thanks to reprints in newspapers and reruns on TV, Peanuts remains as popular as ever; its many fans will be enthralled by the unexpected insight Michaelis provides into Schulz's singular accomplishment.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
How Charles Schulz created Peanuts, and how Peanuts exorcised his personal sorrows and the burdens of a generation. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The idolized comic strip and its revered creator, conjoined American avatars of the second half of the 20th century, are both fully explored in this shared biography. As Michaelis (N.C. Weyth, 1998, etc.) demonstrates with the help of many cartoons, the antics of Peanuts' characters formed a clear autobiography of Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000). The barber's son from Minnesota was born to create a comic strip, if nothing else. He was a dweeby, dreamy lad called "Sparky" from infancy--an odd nickname for a serious youth who ignited little excitement. An abstemious churchgoer, he was timid around girls, especially pretty redheads. Sparky was determined, though, to have a cartoonist's career. Home from the Army in 1945, he worked as a correspondence-school art instructor. Early on, he knew three Charlie Browns: One was a high-school friend; one was an art-school colleague who became a bit odd as his fictional namesake became celebrated; the third was an ecclesiastic. The energetic first Mrs. Schulz, usually managing Sparky, morphed into Lucy. The flourishing Peanuts strip provided a lavish California home and studio, spawned endorsements, television specials and books. Happiness was not, however, a warm bank account. With an upscale ice rink came tax problems, divorce and remarriage. The world's most successful and rewarded cartoonist, the man who coined the term "security blanket," nursed anxieties. "Sparky really didn't give a damn about people," one friend noted. Schulz was the subject of many articles and interviews, so much of his story is known, but this fine, exhaustive text is well-organized and knowledgeable. Whether or not Peanuts was inspired, as fans insist, or just insipid, Michaelis offers considerable insight into the semiotics of comics and the psyche of a master of the craft. All that's needed about a prodigy of American cultural history. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
