My Life with Charlie Brown [Hardcover]

Charles M. Schulz (Author), M. Thomas Inge (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Inge’s gathering of “Schulz’s major prose writings” attests the cartoonist’s consistency. He wrote without drawing as limpidly as he did with. His sentences are as chaste and precise in diction, as direct in address, and as lucid in meaning as the words he put in the Peanuts gang’s speech and thought balloons. His stylistic peers are Hemingway and the best of the lean, clean, mostly crime-fiction writers who followed Papa. But he’s never as passive as Papa, never as sentimental as those crime-fictionists. He sounds ingenuous and comradely, one person talking to another, engaged but uncontentious. He’s that way in the big pieces here, all excerpts from Peanuts Jubilee (1975), in which he’s spellbinding about his life, his creative process, and the themes of his great comic strip. He waxes most enthusiastic about religion when young (older, he is more diffident on that score), about golf when older, about hockey always. The previously unpublished fragments Inge includes sometimes approach prose poetry. All in all, verification that Schulz was an artist, indeed. --Ray Olson

Product Description

While best known as the creator of Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000) was also a thoughtful and precise prose writer who knew how to explain his craft in clear and engaging ways. My Life with Charlie Brown brings together his major prose writings, many published here for the first time.

Schulz's autobiographical articles, book introductions, magazine pieces, lectures, and commentary elucidate his life and his art, and clarify themes of modern life, philosophy, and religion that are interwoven into his beloved, groundbreaking comic strip. Edited and with an introduction by comics scholar M. Thomas Inge, this volume will serve as the touchstone for Schulz's thoughts and convictions and as a wide-ranging, unique autobiography in the absence of a traditional, extended memoir.

Inge and the Schulz estate have chosen a number of illustrations to include. With the approval and cooperation of the Schulz family, Inge draws on the cartoonist's entire archives, papers, and correspondence to allow Schulz full voice to speak his mind. The project includes his comics criticism, his introductions to Peanuts volumes, his essays about philanthropy, his commentary on Christianity, his newspaper articles about the creation of his characters, and more. My Life with Charlie Brown will reveal new dimensions of this legendary cartoonist.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (March 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1604734477
• ISBN-13: 978-1604734478
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #170,217 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very informative reflections by Charles Schulz, April 25, 2010

By	lordhoot "lordhoot" (Anchorage, Alaska USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: My Life with Charlie Brown (Hardcover)

This book is a collection of writings by Charles M. Schulz who won fame and fortune by his creation of Peanuts, a cartoon strip still read by millions of people ten years after his untimely death. Most of the writings have been published already in various magazines or came from speeches he made many years ago before his death in 2000. Few are unpublished notations. All that have been complied into this one book. This book allowed the reader to look into Schulz's life, his creation and his outlook in an almost autobiographical term. Its a very reflective book on Charles Schulz as he writes mostly about himself and his experiences. Its a short book, 193 pages including the index. The man who edited this book is M. Thomas Inge. In case some of you do not know, he also edited another book titled "Charles M. Schulz Conversations", a book that complied many of Schulz's best interviews.

If you combined both books, you will probably get a very interesting, insightful and informative understanding of Charles Schulz as a man, as a cartoonist and as a human being. They are probably closest thing you can have to an autobiography.

Of course, the only reason why this book did not received five stars is that few entries in this book have already published in another book titled "Peanuts Jubilee" by Charles M. Schulz (who else?) that was published back in 1975. I still owned that book so I thought maybe Mr. Inge could have chosen a different set of entries. Its one thing to take an article here or there from various magazines but from another Peanuts book is something else.

For anyone interested in Charles M. Schulz and his creation, I guess I can say that reading this book would be a no brainer. Reading it with "Charles M. Schulz Conversations" will allow you to get the facts from straight from the source. While not a perfect format, this would have to do until some one can do real justice to Schulz by writing a real biography!

5.0 out of 5 stars A book that will tell you a lot about Peanuts, June 8, 2010

By	ABC Snoopy "Adam" (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life with Charlie Brown (Hardcover)

This was a good book. I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot about Charles Schulz, his life, and the strip. Peanuts is one of my favorite strips ever. The book even has a few comics inside of it. It has autobiographical essays, introductions, articles, reviews, and lectures that tell the personal tale of The Peanuts creator and America's greatest comic strip. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves Peanuts. Again if you are Peanuts fan than this is the book for you. Enjoy.