David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr. Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte also liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest of the Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full access to his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to help him.
But Monte Schulz said that when he read Mr. Michaelis’s manuscript in December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after different women.
“It’s not true,” Monte said. “It’s preposterous.”
The Times story suggests that not all of Schulz's kids disagree with Michaelis' perspective. What Michaelis says about Schulz's life and art makes sense to me.
“He was a complicated artist who had an inner life and embedded that inner life on the page,” Mr. Michaelis said in an interview. “His anxieties and fears brought him Lucy and the characters in ‘Peanuts.’”
“A normal person couldn’t have done it,” he said.
What I loved, as a child, about this comic strip, particularly the paperbacks with the earlier years, is how the strip dealt with disappointment, with insecurity, with feeling like a loser, because that's how I felt, too. That had to come from somewhere in Charles Schulz's life story.
Here is the December 2000 Time piece by Michaelis about Schulz mentioned in the New York Times story.
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