Word: schulz
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...experience of being an Everyman - a decent, caring person in a hostile world - was essential to Charlie Brown's character, as it was to Charles Schulz's. We recognized ourselves in him - in his doomed ballgames, his deep awareness of death, his stoicism in the face of life's disasters - because he was willing to admit that just to keep on being Charlie Brown was an exhausting and painful process. "You don't know what it's like to be a barber's son," Charlie Brown tells Schroeder. He remembers how it felt to see tears running down his father...
...supposed to feel," he was speaking for people everywhere in Eisenhower's America, especially for a generation of solemn, precociously cynical college students, who "inhabited a shadow area within the culture," the writer Frank Conroy recalled. They were the last generation to grow up, as Schulz had, without television, and they read Charlie Brown's utterances as existential statements - comic strip koans about the human condition...
...keys." The "Peanuts" characters conversed in plain language and at the same time questioned the meaning of life itself. "Peanuts" depicted genuine pain and loss but somehow, as the cartoonist Art Spiegelman observed, "still kept everything warm and fuzzy." By fusing adult ideas with a world of small children, Schulz reminded us that although childhood wounds remain fresh, we have the power as adults to heal ourselves with humor. If we can laugh at the daily struggles of a bunch of funny-looking kids and in their worries recognize the adults we've become, we can free ourselves. This alchemy...
...hard to remember now, when Snoopy and Charlie Brown dominate the blimps at golf tournaments instead of the comics in Sunday papers, that once upon a time Schulz's strip was the fault-line of a cultural earthquake. Garry Trudeau, creator of "Doonesbury," who came of age as a comic strip artist under Schulz's influence, thought of it as "the first Beat strip." Edgy, unpredictable, ahead of its time, "Peanuts" "vibrated with '50s alienation," Trudeau recalled. "Everything about it was different...
...SCHULZ DID. A SHY, TIMID BOY, a barber's son, born on November 26, 1922, "Sparky" Schulz - nicknamed for the horse in "Barney Google"- had grown up from modest beginnings in St Paul, Minnesota, to realize his earliest dream of creating a newspaper comic strip. The only child of devoted parents, neither of whom had gone further in school than the third grade, Schulz linked the happy unsophistication of his childhood home with the ideal of a dignified, ordinary life that he forever after tried to return to. "There are times," he wrote at 58, "when I would like...