The Peanuts Papers: Writers And Cartoonists On Charlie Brown, Snoopy & The Gang, And The Meaning Of Life

"This collection of essays about Charles Schulz’s venerable comic strip might start off shakily – with selections that sweatily invoke Anton Chekhov and Eugène Ionesco, as if their authors feel the need to justify writing critically about a newspaper comic. But before long, the essays settle down and start to unpack the strip and its characters, instead of comparing them with other work. The best of these engage directly and vigorously with the unsentimental sense of melancholy that Schulz delivered to millions of American doorsteps on a daily basis."