Schulz and Peanuts
David Michaelis's Biography of Cartoonist Charles Schulz
Michaelis reveals how Charles Schulz's lonely childhood shaped his later life and his extraordinary comic strip about Good Old Charlie Brown.
As a child growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Charles (Sparky) Schulz felt that his drawing abilities were unappreciated by most of his teachers, friends and relatives. When he failed several courses in high school, his parents never even commented on it. They did not seem to expect him to amount to anything. This was very difficult for a boy who had already decided, at age six, that he wanted to be a professional cartoonist. There was nothing else, in fact, that really motivated him.
His mother Dena, who died of cancer in 1943, was more fearful than proud of her son's talent. Michaelis writes, "She could indulge Sparky's drawing and admire his handiwork with a pen; it was fine for diversion or, at most, a hobby, but nothing in her experience made drawing more than an odd, trivial pastime." This lack of encouragement would haunt Schulz to the end of his days, causing him to never quite believe that he was loved and admired by others, even when he was the nation's most popular and wealthiest cartoonist.
A Competitive Nature
Schulz, who always denied being a real artist, and who went to his office to make a daily cartoon strip the same way his father had gone to his barbershop every morning to cut hair, was a highly competitive person when it came to his work. He always wanted to beat out the competition, and was not always sensitive in what he said to other cartoonists. Because he was often a self-effacing person, this competitiveness often surprised people. "His inability to acknowledge the scope of his ambition or to accept responsiblity for the pain he gave others" were traits that strained some of his closest relationships, according to Michaelis.
Yet Schulz, who was always confident in his work, also identified closely with Charlie Brown, who was anything but a winner. Charlie Brown had an Everyman quality about him, and Peanuts spoke for Eisenhower's America, especially for cynical college students who read his statements as existential truths. He became a national symbol for the little guy who tries to succeed against tremendous odds.
Ordinary Human Problems
Although Lucy was shrill and demanding, no genuinely threatening character appeared in Peanuts, Michaelis observes. "Disillusionments and ambushes came aplenty, but none set by an enemy. Schulz enlarged his characters--and his readers' expectations of the funny pges--by sharply contrasting the very human littleness of Charlie Brown with the huge surrounding universe." He used small situations, many taken directly from his own personal experience, to ask big philosophical questions concerning life's meaning and purpose.
Michaelis did extensive research and numerous interviews with those who knew Charles Schulz. And his hard work paid off, because Schulz and Peanuts is a comprehensive, engrossing and detailed biography of an elusive man who did not particularly want to know what made himself tick, but who wanted to know just about everything else.
HarperCollins 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-621393-4
