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 The previously unpublished fragments Inge includes sometimes approach prose poetry.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.
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.
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