Charlie Brown Gets the Blues

Charles M. Schulz drew “Peanuts” for nearly half a century, and the comic strip became a touchstone for the baby boom generation: an epic meditation, at once rueful and barbed, about the disappointments and existential quandaries of life, a funny-sad-wistful portrait of a recognizable world in which love goes unrequited, baseball games are always lost, and the Great Pumpkin never shows up.

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS
By David Michaelis
Illustrated. 655 pages. HarperCollins. $34.95.

The ever hopeful, ever rejected Charlie Brown; his cynical, rage-filled nemesis, Lucy Van Pelt; the philosophical and self-possessed Linus; the fanatic pianist Schroeder; and Snoopy, that bumptious beagle with the extraordinary fantasy life: these were characters who resonated with a generation that came of age during that perplexing period of transition as the country lurched from the somnolent ’50s into the psychedelic ’60s and ’70s.

And they were characters, as David Michaelis observes in his revealing new biography, deeply rooted in their creator’s own life. It’s not just that Charlie Brown embodied Schulz’s own melancholy temperament and insecurities; it’s not just that Lucy represented his first wife’s bossy impatience.

It’s that all the characters represented aspects of the deeply conflicted artist himself. As Mr. Michaelis writes, Schulz “gave his wishy-washiness and determination to Charlie Brown,” his sarcasm to Lucy, “his dignity and ‘weird little thoughts’” to Linus, his “perfectionism and devotion to his art to Schroeder,” his sense of “being talented and unappreciated to Snoopy.”

Full review in New York Times today.