Word: schulz
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...October 2, 1950, at the height of the American postwar celebration - an era when being unhappy was an antisocial rather than a personal emotion - a 27-year-old Minnesota cartoonist named Charles M. Schulz introduced to the funny papers a group of children who told one another the truth...
...This was something new in the newspaper comic strip. At mid-century the comics were dominated by action and adventure, vaudeville and melodrama, slapstick and gags. Schulz dared to use his own quirks - a lifelong sense of alienation, insecurity and inferiority - to draw the real feelings of his life and time. He brought a spare pen line, Jack Benny timing and a subtle sense of humor to taboo themes such as faith, intolerance, depression, loneliness, cruelty and despair. His characters were contemplative. They spoke with simplicity and force. They made smart observations about literature, art, classical music, theology, medicine, psychiatry...
...They explained America the way Huckleberry Finn does: Americans believe in friendship, in community, in fairness, but in the end, we are dominated by our apartness, our individual isolation - an isolation that went very deep, both in Schulz and in his characters...
...lifelong student of the American comic strip, Schulz knew the universal power of varying a few basic themes. He said things clearly. He distilled human emotion to its essence. In a few tiny lines - a circle, a dash, a loop, and two black spots - he could tell anyone in the world what a character was feeling. He was a master at portraying emotion, and took a simple approach to character development, assigning to each figure in the strip one or two memorable traits and problems, often highly comic, which he reprised whenever the character reappeared...
...this year. While we were worrying about Katherine Harris' mascara, scientists continued to map the human genome. There were new photographs suggesting that lakes and seas may have existed on Mars. The Pope visited the Western Wall in Israel. Great people left the world--Alec Guinness, John Gielgud, Charles Schulz. Memory-enhancing drugs were in production, so that one day, 10 years from now, we'll be able to recall the name Richard Hatch. The President went to Vietnam. Stuff like that...