They were special to me, and so was the man behind them. For some reason I identified with those characters. For all of my life, since my grandmother first got me a Charlie Brown painting as a child, I have followed the characters of Charles M. It's an amazing thing to read or listen to a well written biography of one of your heroes. On the other hand, the book is quite long enough, there's no real dross here, so I can't complain too much. There's an amazing business story that's not told here, and the author suggests that that's because Schultz himself sort of let it happen via his surrogates rather than directing it himself. I was rather disappointed not to hear a bit more about the business end of things-how Peanuts became an industry and how Schultz's characters wound up selling snack cakes and life insurance and all that. The story of A Charlie Brown Christmas alone is quite revealing. The stories about where all the ideas and characters for Peanuts came from are quite entertaining. What do they think made him a cartoon genius? And his love for them and for his wives is also quite palpable.
I'm not sure what his kids are upset about-so Dad was generally melancholy and a bit removed. This seemed to me to be a fair and overwhelmingly positive portrait of Schulz. Michaelis brilliantly weaves Schulz's story with the cartoons that are so familiar to us, revealing a man we've never fully known and shedding new light on a touchstone of American life. But the strip was anchored in the collective experience and hardships of Schulz's generation: the generation that survived the Great Depression and liberated Europe and the Pacific and came home to build the postwar world. Schulz's Peanuts profoundly influenced the country in the second half of the 20th century. It was the central truth of his own life, that as the adults we've become and as the children we always will be, we can free ourselves, if only we can see the humor in the predicaments of funny-looking kids. With Peanuts, Schulz embedded adult ideas in a world of small children to remind the reader that character flaws and childhood wounds are with us always.
And these early experiences would shape his entire life. The sense of shock and separation never left him. In 1943, just three days after his mother's tragic death from cancer, Schulz, a private in the army, shipped out for boot camp and the war in Europe. The son of a barber, Schulz was born in Minnesota to modest, working class roots. Now, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis gives us the first full-length biography of Schulz: at once a creation story, a portrait of a hidden American genius, and a chronicle contrasting the private man with the central role he played in shaping the national imagination. Charles Schulz, the most widely syndicated and beloved cartoonist of all time, is also one of the most misunderstood figures in American culture.
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