My Life with Charlie Brown is a collection of various prose essays that Schulz did for various publications, talking (generally) about Peanuts and his life as a cartoonist.

For those studying Schulz, this is an interesting work. You’re apt to have seen much of the material before; the biggest chunk of the material (about 1/3) is the text portions of Peanuts Jubilee, the 25th anniversary book from 2005. Other pieces we’ve seen excerpted from elsewhere, providing sideline commentary in books like You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown and Peanuts: A Golden Celebration. Still other pieces are unpublished, seen here for the first time. Sources include not just Peanuts books, but articles written for newspapers, magazines, and books, and one transcribed speech for the National Cartoonist Society, with items from the 1950s into the 1990s. One piece is officially written not by Schulz, but by Charlie Brown.

Schulz’s prose is clear, clean, and direct. His flow from topic to topic is, however, rather choppy. He speaks in short anecdotes, which actually makes it good for the sort of excerption that was done in some of the anniversary books, but can give the reader a bit of whiplash reading it. Often, they read more like a personal letter than something with a specific theme to cover.

There are lots of little treats to be found – Schulz denying his first wife was a “Lucy” (a key claim of Schulz and Peanuts), some comments on the creation of the Youth magazine cartoons that I wish I had when editing Schulz’s Youth, Schulz expressing his interest in Northern Exposure star Janine Turner, and so forth. On the other hand, since most of this material was created not as a single organized effort but for specific purposes, there is a lot you’d want to see Schulz write about that he didn’t, as well as some repetition beween articles.

The main organization of the book is solid; there’s a Schulz timeline in the front to give you context, then the essays are grouped as “My Life”, “My Profession”, and “My Art” – logical and useful groupings, and there’s an appendix for a couple of odd bits (a report Schulz wrote for a class on the novel; a poem he wrote for his wife). However, there are some sloppinesses – a didn’t’ here, an incorrect attribution there, calling Craftint Doubletone paper Crafting – and some bad choices. The source of each essay is named at the end of the essay, when knowing the source while reading the essay would actually help the reader understand the intended context – who was being written to and when (I found myself simply skipping to the end of each piece before I read it). There are occasional Peanuts strips inserted, and the pages they’re on include distracting thick black angles; it was a while before I realized that they were supposed to invoke the zig-zag on Charlie Brown’s shirt. There aren’t explanations for individual pieces, so that things that would be understood by Schulz’s intended audience can go by the reader. For example, in his address to the NCS, Schulz complained about people who were not members and who said that they weren’t “joiners”, it might help to know he was referring to comments by “Calvin & Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson; or the one place (I can’t quickly find to quote) where he talks about keeping his strip clean and not doing material about toilets and fire hydrants, which might not make sense unless you’d read “Mother Goose & Grimm” and seen how those items are used in that strip (Schulz certainly did not exile fire hydrants from his strip, he just didn’t use them in untoward ways.)

So is it an ideal version of what it is? I don’t think so – but it’s something that is good enough. I’m glad that I have it.

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