Like his strip, Schulz was regular, purposeful and, in some ways, liberating. At the same time, he was a fundamentalist Christian, a prude, and a teetotaler. How the superficially guileless but driven Schulz and his sophisticated, outwardly innocent strip dovetailed occupy this exceptional biography by David Michaelis, a perceptive cultural observer with great powers of interpretation. Michaelis subtitles this "A Biography" because it's about both Schulz and his creation. By the end of this long, affectionate yet critical work, which embeds 240 "Peanuts" strips in its text, you understand why Schulz ruled that "Peanuts" cease when he did. All reruns since 2000, it remains inimitable.
It also remains deeply American in its wistfulness. When Schulz moved west with Joyce, his strong-willed first wife, he tuned into his loneliness, the wellspring of his art. By introducing the character of Lucy (who shared some attributes with Joyce) to the strip, he broadened it:
"Before Lucy, the strip had been a brilliant ongoing marginal doodle; Schulz saw it as 'tiny world,' " Michaelis writes. "Drawn in Colorado Springs at the edge of the Rockies, "Peanuts" gave a sense of America the way "Huckleberry Finn" does. Americans believe in friendship, in community, in fairness; but in the end, they are dominated by their apartness, their individual isolation - an isolation that went very deep, in Schulz, in his new household, and in his characters, who turned from the disappointments dished out in the strip's fourth frame to look directly at the reader."
