My Life with Charlie Brown

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.

Autobiographical essays, introductions, articles, reviews, and lectures that tell the personal tale of the Peanuts creator and America's great comic strip

The Washington Post - James Rosen

Schulz's prose is straightforward, seldom as elliptical, poetic or biting as the dialogue he invented for Linus and Lucy. Yet these essays prove unfailingly compelling and often mesmerizing—not merely for the insight they offer into the towering genius of "Peanuts," but because Schulz the memoirist was so penetrating an observer.

Charles M. Schulz created the popular comic strip Peanuts, which appeared in over 2,600 newspapers and in over seventy-five countries.

M. Thomas Inge is Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of the Humanities at Randolph-Macon College. He has edited or authored over sixty volumes, including books on Schulz, the comics, William Faulkner, and Oliver W. Harrington. Inge is the general editor of two University Press of Mississippi series, Conversations with Comics Artists and Great Comics Artists.