基本信息出版社：Harper
页码：672 页
出版日期：2007年10月
ISBN：0066213932
条形码：9780066213934
装帧：精装
正文语种：英语
外文书名：舒尔茨和他的花生: 一部传记

内容简介 在线阅读本书

Charles M. Schulz, the most widely syndicated and beloved cartoonist of all time, is also one of the least understood figures in American culture. Now acclaimed biographer David Michaelis gives us the first full-length biography of the brilliant, unseen man behind Peanuts: at once a creation story, a portrait of a native genius, and a chronicle contrasting the private man with the central role he played in shaping the national imagination.

It is the most American of stories: How a barber's son grew up from modest beginnings to realize his dream of creating a newspaper comic strip. How he daringly chose themes never before attempted in mainstream cartoons—loneliness, isolation, melancholy, the unending search for love—always lightening the darker side with laughter and mingling the old-fashioned sweetness of childhood with a very adult and modern awareness of the bitterness of life. And how, using a lighthearted, loving touch, a crow-quill pen dipped in ink, and a cast of memorable characters, he portrayed the struggles that come with being awkward, imperfect, human.

With Peanuts, Schulz profoundly influenced America in the second half of the twentieth century. But the humorous strip was anchored in the collective experience and hardships of the artist's generation—the generation that survived the Great Depression, liberated Europe and the Pacific, and came home to build the prosperous postwar world. Michaelis masterfully weaves Schulz's story with the cartoons that are so familiar to us, revealing how so much more of his life was part of the strip than we ever knew.

Based on years of research, including exclusive interviews with the cartoonist's family, friends, and colleagues, unprecedented access to his studio and business archives, and new caches of personal letters and drawings, Schulz and Peanuts is the definitive epic biography of an American icon and the unforgettable characters he created.

作者简介

David Michaelis is the author of N.C. Wyeth: A Biography, among other books. His writing has appeared in The New York Observer, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, The New Republic, and The American Scholar. He lives in New York City.

编辑推荐 Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, October 2007: There's no book this year that made people's eyes light up when I told them about it more than Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis's new biography of cartoonist Charles Schulz. (And when they saw the obvious-but-brilliant Chip Kidd-designed cover, their eyes got even brighter.) Everyone, it seems, feels a personal connection to Peanuts (a name, by the way, that Schulz always hated), but few have a sense of the artist whose small troupe of big-headed characters still lives at the center of our imagination. If some mystery about the man still remains after reading Michaelis's sharp, engaging, and level-headed biography that's no fault of the biographer--in fact, it's to his credit. Michaelis parses Schulz's particular combination of Midwestern reserve and steely determination and the strip's still-surprising balance of exuberance and misery, and he reminds us what a colossal cultural force it became, especially in the 1960s. But even as he ingeniously finds sources for Schulz's four-panel vignettes in the events of his biography, he recognizes that the true, sometimes inexplicable drama of his life took place when he sat down every day for 50 years to trace Linus's wobbly strands of hair, fill in Snoopy's black nose, and, time and again, letter the words "Good grief." --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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)
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专业书评 From Bookmarks Magazine
David Michaelis’s book, the first full-scale biography of Charles Schulz, is almost as universally adored as his subject’s comic strips. The former biographer of N. C. Wyeth (whose son Andrew was a hero of Schulz’s) takes on America’s best-known cartoonist, drawing on exclusive access to Schulz’s papers and interviews with nearly every living Schulz acquaintance. Erring on the side of inclusion, the book sometimes seems too rich with detail, and one reviewer faults Michaelis’s focus on Schulz’s gloomier side (a criticism that Schulz’s own daughter has made about the book). Otherwise, reviewers are riveted by the revelatory correspondences between Schulz’s groundbreaking work and the man who brought it to life.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
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

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A fascinating account of an artist who devoted his life to his work."

Walter Isaacson
"Michaelis takes us on a wondrous journey through the worlds of Charlie Brown and Charles Schulz."

Chris Ware
"After you read this book you will know the genius that went into every single line that Charles Schulz drew."

Walter Cronkite
"An insightful rendering of the life of this American treasure."

Kirkus Reviews
"Michaelis offers . . . all that’s needed about a prodigy of American cultural history."

Time magazine
"An extraordinary achievement . . . that shrinks Schulz down to human size and enlarges our love of his work."

GQ
"This fall’s breakout biography."