Book Title:  Schulz and Peanuts:  A Biography

Author: David Michaelis

Publishing Company:  HarperCollins Publishers

Year:  2007

# of Pages:  655

ISBN:  978-0-06-621393-4

ISBN:  10: 0-06-621393-2 

$34.95 USA

$41.50 Canada

4 ½ Stars

Reviewer:  Deborah Ground Buckner

I have to begin this review by making two confessions.  First, I cannot remember a time in my life when I did not know the name Charles Schulz.  His comic strip Peanuts and Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Snoopy and the rest of the gang have been with me from the beginning.  Family lore tells me one of my first uttered sentences was:  "Oh, wats.  I yanded on my head," quoting Snoopy's reaction to a fall from atop his doghouse in the Sunday comics.  After my mother read "the funnies" to me, I seemed to find that statement particularly enchanting and repeated it through most of the day.

Secondly, I approached David Michaelis' biography Schulz and Peanuts with great trepidation, hence the delayed review for this book released early last fall.  We did not obtain a review copy from the publisher in this case.  I wanted to read this book, but the initial reviews I saw suggested this to be a dark, nasty "tell-all" revealing "the monster" behind one of America's most-beloved comic strips.  Convinced Mr. Michaelis had engaged in a smear job of one of my heroes, I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of buying this book.  So, I put my name on the request list at my public library.  After 103 readers ahead of me, my turn came up last week.  Forget those other reviews.  Read mine, and then read this book.  In fact, buy it.

Michaelis takes the reader on a journey through the life of Charles "Sparky" Schulz from beginning to end.  If ever a man was born to fulfill a particular destiny, it was Schulz, and he had the sense to recognize early in life that he was to be a cartoonist.  Even his life-long nickname, Sparky, came from the comics.  On seeing the new baby, a maternal uncle said, "By golly, we're going to call him 'Spark Plug.'"  "Spark Plug" was the broken down racehorse acquired by comic hero Barney Google ("with the goo-goo-googley eyes") just months before the birth of young Schulz.  "Spark Plug" won a $50,000 purse for his master and soon became a household name.  Just why the uncle thought the baby resembled the famous horse was never explained.

In the Great Depression, the newspaper comics were a force that drew people together, with readers throughout the country following the adventures of Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, Blondie, and Bringing Up Father.  On Sparky's eleventh birthday, in 1933 in the midst of the Depression, while shopping with his mother, he found a book "How to Draw Cartoons."  He studied the text and the different examples and "From that point on, I was totally fascinated by the style[s] of drawing that different people had."  He began studying any book with pen and ink drawings that he could find in the public library.

Sparky was his parents' only child.  His father, Carl, a barber (as was Charlie Brown's), at least enjoyed a regular income through those trying years.  But his mother, Dena, suffered from cervical cancer for years, at a time when such an illness was difficult to diagnose and rarely discussed.  No one ever explained the illness to Sparky.  Often, Dena was forced to keep to her bed, but still she found an advertisement in the newspaper for a mail-order class in art lessons.  In 1940, he enrolled in the class, the lessons costing a total of $170, payable $10 per month.  His father told him not to worry; they would manage.  In his years as the most popular cartoonist in the world, Schulz never failed to mention he had his beginnings with a correspondence school.

Michaelis takes the reader along as Sparky leaves for service in the war, saying a final good-bye to his mother who died shortly after her boy became a soldier.  Sparky found success in the Army, advancing in rank and leadership and confidence as well.  But he never lost sight of his real mission in life, and his soldier buddies often sent home letters with Schulz cartoons drawn on the envelopes.

Returned home from the Army, Schulz began a concerted effort to become a professional cartoonist, sending gag cartoons out to magazines and developing a comic strip, and everyone who has ever heard of Peanuts knows the outcome of his efforts.

Schulz and Peanuts offers a complete study of a career, from the earliest rejections to the first commercial success, to artistic recognition.  I was moved to tears reading about the development of the television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas.  Schulz insisted the passage from the Gospel According to Luke relating the story of the Nativity must be included.  Network "geniuses" feared offending someone with the inclusion of the Bible passage.  Schulz adamantly refused the use of a laugh track, saying his readers would know when to laugh.  Upon viewing the completed special, the network representatives  sighed and said, "Well, you tried."  But the special aired, and immediately a rush of mail proved Schulz was right.  The special won both the Peabody Award and an Emmy.

I had goosebumps reading of NASA's Apollo X mission, the moon mission just preceding the Apollo XI moon landing.  Apollo X's command module was named Charlie Brown and its lunar module, Snoopy.   I was in tears again reading of the success of the "gift book," a first of its kind, Happiness is a Warm Puppy.  I was intrigued to learn the popular musical, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, began simply as an album of songs inspired by the characters.  An Off-Broadway company turned it into a play, beginning by simply having the actors read from Peanuts collections during rehearsal. 

Michaelis gives a candid presentation of the anxieties and insecurities that permeated Schulz's being.  He gives a fair presentation of Schulz's two marriages, the first, resulting in five children, which ended in divorce after 24 years, the second, which seemed to bring him happiness to his final days.  Once, when Schulz's first wife, Joyce, suggested he should see a psychiatrist, he refused, convinced his talent would suffer.  Schulz believed that the problems that made his life difficult fueled his life's work.  There is always a thin line between comedy and tragedy, and Schulz was able to draw from his own experiences and memories-often painful-to find inspiration for six daily strips and a Sunday story for every week.  Through it all, until his very last Sunday comic, read in newspapers just hours after Schulz's death from colon cancer, he personally drew and lettered each Peanuts comic.

What keeps me from bestowing a perfect "5 star" rating?  Three things.  First, although many Peanuts strips are included with the text, they are reproduced in such a small form that I had to use a magnifying glass to read them!  Second, Michaelis often presents a strip and concludes that it was definitely inspired by a particular event or relationship in Schulz's life.  In many cases, such as Lucy's relationship with Schroeder being based on Schulz' relationship with his wife, Joyce, I'm certain he is absolutely right, but not in all.  Schulz maintained all his ideas were his own and would not divulge his inspiration.  So, these conclusions are often speculation on the part of the author and should have been identified as such.  Finally, the absence of footnotes bothered me.  There are source notes in the back of the book, but a lazy reader doesn't want to have to refer back each time to identify the source for the claims presented.  A reader of Schulz's comics knows when to laugh, but a reader of Schulz's biography doesn't want to keep flipping back and forth between some 600 pages!

Schulz and Peanuts includes 32 pages of photographs, 6 pages of acknowledgments, 58 pages of notes, and an index.