http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/books/12book.html?ref=books Books of The Times Charlie Brown Gets the Blues By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Skip to next paragraph SCHULZ AND PEANUTS By David Michaelis Illustrated. 655 pages. HarperCollins. $34.95. Charles M. Schulz drew “Peanuts” for nearly half a century, and the comic strip became a touchstone for the baby boom generation: an epic meditation, at once rueful and barbed, about the disappointments and existential quandaries of life, a funny-sad-wistful portrait of a recognizable world in which love goes unrequited, baseball games are always lost, and the Great Pumpkin never shows up. The ever hopeful, ever rejected Charlie Brown; his cynical, rage-filled nemesis, Lucy Van Pelt; the philosophical and self-possessed Linus; the fanatic pianist Schroeder; and Snoopy, that bumptious beagle with the extraordinary fantasy life: these were characters who resonated with a generation that came of age during that perplexing period of transition as the country lurched from the somnolent ’50s into the psychedelic ’60s and ’ 70s. And they were characters, as David Michaelis observes in his revealing new biography, deeply rooted in their creator’s own life. It’s not just that Charlie Brown embodied Schulz’s own melancholy temperament and insecurities; it’s not just that Lucy represented his first wife’s bossy impatience. It’s that all the characters represented aspects of the deeply conflicted artist himself. As Mr. Michaelis writes, Schulz “gave his wishy-washiness and determination to Charlie Brown,” his sarcasm to Lucy, “ his dignity and ‘weird little thoughts’” to Linus, his “perfectionism and devotion to his art to Schroeder,” his sense of “being talented and unappreciated to Snoopy.” ....................................... By the late 1980s “Peanuts” had become a worldwide phenomenon, a merchandising empire generating more than $1 billion a year and spreading “ tens of millions of plush Snoopys the world over from Argentina to Zimbabwe, Congo to Togo, Norway to New Zealand, Cameroon to Canada.” One of the first comic strips to deal with its characters’ inner lives, a strip built upon its creator’s own anxieties and losses had become, Mr. Michaelis writes, the “most widely syndicated cartoon on the planet, read by 5 percent of the world ’s literate population.” In December 1999 Schulz addressed a letter to his hundreds of millions of readers, announcing that he was going to retire; no one would succeed him in drawing the strip. Two months later, on Feb. 13, 2000, “the Sunday paper carrying his last cartoon arrived with the stunning news that Charles M. Schulz had died in his sleep of complications of colon cancer,” Mr. Michaelis writes. “Just hours later the final ‘Peanuts’ strip appeared in newspapers around the world. To the very end, his life had entwined with his art. As soon as he had ceased to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be.” --

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