"I only dread one day at a time!"

Charles Schulz, the author of the beloved "Peanuts," was himself a depressive, self-deceiving character many found hard to love.

By Laura Miller

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Oct. 13, 2007 | For 45 years, Charles Schulz's comic strip "Peanuts" was part of the furniture of American culture. More ubiquitous and essential to the '60s and '70s than bell-bottoms or shag carpeting, "Peanuts" was almost as pervasive as that supreme totem of Americana, Coca-Cola -- and in my house, even more so, since we were forbidden to drink soda, while the place was littered with as many paperback cartoon collections as could be bought with the allowances of five children. Most remarkable of all, everybody liked "Peanuts": adults as well as children, hippies and straights, Middle America and the coasts, highbrows and the salt of the earth. According to David Michaelis' new biography, "Schulz and Peanuts," by 1971, Schulz had 100 million readers and the fourth-highest sales figures of any 20th century author.

In an era of market niches and polarization, it's astonishing to realize just how universal the appeal of "Peanuts" was. In 1970, at the same time that my family was sympathizing with Snoopy's misadventures during a riot at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, so was the man we considered the personification of political wickedness. Ronald Reagan would write, "It is a great comfort to know that other Head Beagles are having problems, too ... My hero Snoopy has also experienced the joy of a campus disturbance." That Snoopy had been caught up in a demonstration against the enlistment of dogs in the Vietnam War, and tear-gassed with the rest of the crowd, doesn't seem to have fazed the California governor who called out the National Guard to quell similar "disturbances" in Berkeley. Somehow, without (it seems) actually trying to, Schulz succeeded at making all of his readers think that his strip was about them.

Actually, it was about him. Michaelis reveals that the upshot of Snoopy's brush with campus protest -- a breathless romance with a "girl-beagle" who had "the softest paws" -- was inspired by Schulz's extramarital affair with a 25-year-old office worker named Tracey Claudius. Snoopy's sentimental swooning over his lady love was no exaggeration, either; Schulz inundated Claudius with doting notes and flowers and gifts commemorating each month of their "anniversary." For the straight-arrow Schulz, the affair was a first foray into adultery after almost 20 years in a marriage that, while difficult, produced four kids and underpinned the most productive period of his life. Claudius, who regarded "Peanuts" as "holy," was terrified when he took her to the Tonga Room in San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel, convinced that the newspaper columnist Herb Caen would spot them and blow their cover. "I would be the one that would ruin his image for the world," she told Michaelis. "God! If I'd found this out when I was reading it, I would have been crushed. Charlie Brown wouldn't be innocent to me any longer."

Some readers may feel much the same after finishing Michaelis' biography. Not, however, about the affair with Claudius, which was heartfelt and, in its own small way, tragic. Schulz was no philanderer, though he was prone to crushes on "distant princesses" (cf, Charlie Brown's little red-headed girl). Rather, it's learning about the depressive, anxious, detached, resentful, self-defeating and self-deceiving personality of the comic strip's creator that's likely to puzzle and sadden some of those who grew up with "Peanuts." (And, really, what American child didn't grow up with Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Peppermint Patty, as well as Snoopy?) I realized, reading this book, that it's as impossible for me to be objective about "Peanuts" as it is to be impartial about my own parents; like Mom and Dad, Schulz's characters had always been there, four panels every weekday and in color on Sundays. (Schulz retired in late 1999, and died just before his last strip appeared in February 2000.)

No wonder, then, that reading "Schulz and Peanuts" feels like reliving the last 40 years. Strangely enough, Schulz's own life seems to recapitulate the quintessential experiences of postwar America's middle class. Born into Midwestern rectitude as the son of a popular barber in St. Paul, Minn., his early life was shaped by neighborhood baseball games, the funny pages, Depression-mandated economies and, finally, World War II. Schulz, known to his intimates as Sparky, went into the army a sensitive only child ("a mother's boy," as a sympathetic corporal referred to him) and emerged, to quote his own Brokaw-esque formulation, "a man."

He got a day job as a drawing instructor at a correspondence school in Minneapolis, palling around with co-workers who introduced him to modern art and classical music. With the help of the GI bill and his first contract with United Features, the syndicate that handled "Peanuts" for its entire run, Schulz got married and moved into a series of suburban homes with his wife, Joyce. Then "Peanuts" really began to catch on, first on college campuses, where "a student generation absorbed in irony and tension, paradox and ambiguity" found a mirror in the light existential musings and chronic social discomfort of Schulz's round-headed child characters. "When Charlie Brown first confessed, 'I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel,'" writes Michaelis, "he spoke for Eisenhower's America."

These sections of "Schulz and Peanuts" conjure a time of brand-new ranch houses and earnest young men, autodidacts in dark skinny ties and heavy, black-rimmed glasses, listening intently to classical LPs and reading "The Great Gatsby" on the train to work. Michaelis describes dinners the Schulzes threw for their friends, Fritz and Louanne Van Pelt (who gave their surname to Linus and Lucy), where the dishes served included, "Joyce's specialty, pear halves in green Jell-O topped with a dollop of mayonnaise and grated cheddar cheese, followed by an evening of auction bridge to a background of Beethoven's symphonies."

Eventually, Schulz's burgeoning wealth made a move to California seem somehow inevitable. In 1958, they bought a ranch in Santa Rosa, not far from San Francisco, and Joyce, a dynamo, proceeded to build the ultimate family-oriented paradise in which to raise their five children. (She had a daughter from an improvident first marriage, whom Schulz adopted.) It featured an 11-room open-plan house with a central redwood deck, tennis courts, a Little League-size baseball diamond, riding stables, a swimming pool, a privet maze and even, eventually, a nine-hole miniature golf course with an around-the-world theme. Their daughter Amy called it "our little Disneyland."

By the late 1960s, however, the marriage began to splinter under the pressures so common to that time: a frustrated wife, a remote husband and wayward teenagers. After the Schulzes split up in 1972, they both remarried, he to a divorcee, a 33-year-old fitness buff who introduced him to jogging, benignly tolerated his many crushes and expertly managed the moodiness that had always exasperated his first spouse. Despite living a notably abstemious life -- he never smoked, "could count on his fingers the number of times he had drunk alcohol," and remained rail-thin to the end -- Schulz died at 77, not young, but too soon for a man who had expected to go on drawing his strip into his 80s.

The emotional terrain of Schulz's life sounds typical for his time, as well. Joyce and his children complained incessantly of his detachment and obsession with work. Amy recalls hearing an interviewer ask him how his kids were doing, and get a reply about Charlie Brown and Co., rather than his flesh-and-blood children. "Oh great," she thought, "he thinks of his characters before us ... Were we his everything? No. His strip was his everything." Yet "Peanuts" usually reflected some family dynamic, often with Joyce cast as Lucy (ouch!) and Sparky Schulz submerged in his drawing like Schroeder at the piano.

The niftiest part of "Schulz and Peanuts" is the way Michaelis juxtaposes biographical material with the strips Schulz was writing at the time. Some of the details are merely droll: After Schulz won his first award from a comic artist's association, he drew Lucy receiving a trophy for "Outstanding Fussbudget of Hennepin County." Peppermint Patty and Marcie take part in an "all-woman transcontinental air race" (flying Snoopy's doghouse) at the same time that Schulz's second wife got her pilot's license. But readers loved "Peanuts" for dealing with deeper concerns, as well; Schulz's slowly building disenchantment with religion was reflected in Linus' misguided commitment to the doctrine of the Great Pumpkin.

Next page: Was Charlie Brown the creator's alter ego?