On October 16 HarperCollins will publish Schulz and Peanuts, author David Michaelis’s startling and comprehensive biography of the late Charles M. Schulz. Through seven years of research and interviews, Michaelis looks past Schulz’s familiar public persona to reveal his deep melancholy and its sources in his youth, his troubled first marriage and his persistent anxieties. Despite the enormous success he achieved, even at the end of his life Schulz still felt himself a failure. Though Schulz was beloved by his readers worldwide, Michaelis says that the great cartoonist suffered from the sense of “being alone in the world.”
Schulz and Peanuts is also a groundbreaking work in the growing field of biographies of comics creators, as Michaelis analyzes Schulz’s comics as a guide to understanding his psyche. “Peanuts was his life, his world, his yin and his yang,” Michaelis said.
HarperCollins is providing a major publicity push for this book, with a 125,000-copy initial print run. Excerpts will run in this month’s Vanity Fair; Michaelis will tour several major cities; and he will appear in the American Masters documentary Good Ol’ Charles Schulz, which premieres October 29 on PBS.
Michaelis previously wrote N.C. Wyeth: A Biography (Knopf, 1998) about the great American illustrator, and has an interest in people who tell stories through pictures. “The great joy I had writing the biography of Wyeth was that so much of his life was glimpsed directly and indirectly through powerful images in [his illustrations for] Treasure Island, Robin Hood and Robinson Crusoe,” he told PWCW. Michaelis uses a similar approach with Schulz’s work.
On February 14, 2000, Michaelis was moved by reading the “astonishing” double-page obituary for Schulz in the New York Times. He said he felt “the passion for Peanuts he had as a child,” but then realized “how little one knew of Schulz the man. It struck me as a powerful biographical question.” Schulz “was a boy from St. Paul, Minn., who used to say he was just a ‘nothing,’ a young man who was genuinely modest, kind and humble. How could he have created a work as complex and as various as Peanuts?”
Michaelis wrote to Schulz’s widow, Jean, proposing a biography of her husband. She soon responded, revealing that her husband had been reading Michaelis’s Wyeth biography on the night before he died. Meeting in June 2000, Michaelis and Mrs. Schulz “agreed that the time to do a biography was now,” while the people Charles Schulz had known in his childhood, youth and army days were still alive and available for interviews.
United Media, which owns Peanuts, not only opened its comic strip library to Michaelis but made available all of the business correspondence between Schulz and the company. Michaelis said that he “read the whole strip from start to finish.”
He also spent “two to three years just talking to people”—“a couple of hundred”—who knew Schulz. The people from Minnesota and the army “who knew him before fame hit him knew some of the essentials of him.” Michaelis explores and illuminates such matters as the devastating effect of his mother’s death from cancer on the young Schulz, his powerful ambition to become a successful cartoonist and his frustrated romantic longings for the real-life “little red-haired girl” and other young women.
In Peanuts, Schulz’s “past is flowing into the present.” For example, Michaelis said, “I was sitting in Schulz’s studio when I came across a photo [in a desk drawer], clearly from the 1940s, of a young woman posed outside a building. I had no idea who this was.” From interviews “I gradually found out her name is Naomi Cohn,” a young artist whom Schulz had once dated. Michaelis then searched for “Naomi” in United Media’s Peanuts database and discovered that in 1998 Schulz created his last new character for the strip: a girl named Naomi who wears a beret, just as the real Naomi typically did a half-century before.
But the strip was not just about Schulz’s past but about his present. “Peanuts sometimes reads like a diary,” Michaelis observed, with events in the strip reflecting what Schulz was simultaneously feeling and experiencing. “I don’t know to what extent Schulz was aware of Charlie Brown’s universe paralleling the events of his life,” Michaelis said. As an example, he points out that while Schulz was in the process of divorcing his first wife, Joyce, in the strip Charlie Brown “is frustrated with Lucy” and finally throws her off his baseball team. “It had the sound and feeling of a couple coming apart.”
Michaelis’s book recounts how toward the end of his first marriage, Schulz became romantically involved with a young woman named Tracey. (Simultaneously in the strip, Snoopy fell in love with an unseen “girl beagle.”) At the time she worried that if their relationship were publicly exposed, it would not only wreck Schulz’s reputation but also hamper people’s ability to appreciate Peanuts. Might this new biography have that effect on readers?
Michaelis believes that following Schulz’s death, “the greater understanding of his life provides a greater understanding of his art. To see that relationship in the proper context of his life helps us to understand his struggles, who he was and who he wanted to be.” He considers Schulz a “genius” whose work will “be studied for centuries to come.”
“Schulz and Peanuts were not afraid to tell the truth about all of us through the characters,” Michaelis said. He compares the strip at its bleakest to the work of Samuel Beckett. “Why does Charlie Brown lie on the baseline, looking into inky blackness, shouting, 'Why, why, why?' ” Michaelis asked. “We’re all looking into the dark.”
But “Charlie Brown isn’t dark. He’s got dark places to look into.” Schulz “managed to find a lighthearted way to make fun of his struggles and of his loneliness.” Michaelis emphasizes that Charlie Brown never breaks down into tears: he is “stoical” and “goes at it again. We sure love him for his endurance.”
