On the other hand, N. C. Wyeth lived a large, big-themed life, with a tragic, Dreiser-ish subplot for good measure. (In his 60s, he became obsessed with one of his daughters-in-law and died in a railroad-crossing collision — probably by accident, but possibly by intention — with her son, his grandson, at his side.) Schulz’s much longer life (1922-2000) was, by comparison, bland and eventless — or at least the part that wasn’t lived inside his head, and except for the strip, he left few clues as to what was going on in there. Though he was one of the first to introduce psychological themes into cartooning, with Lucy and her sidewalk psychiatric-help booth, he was himself stubbornly unanalytical. His nature was as much a puzzle to him as it was to everyone else. “It took me a long time to become a human being,” he told a magazine interviewer in 1987.

People who knew Schulz always called him Sparky, the nickname given him at birth by an uncle, who shortened it from Spark Plug, the name of a woebegone race horse just recently introduced into the popular Barney Google comic strip. It was an almost comically inappropriate handle — there was nothing in the least scintillating about the young Sparky, who was small, shy, geeky — and also a fateful one, linking him to what from a very early age he determined to be his life work: to produce a syndicated daily comic strip.

Not that there were many signs he had a gift for it, or for anything else. Schulz was born and — except for a weird and awful two-year stint the family endured in the California desert — grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of the Twin Cities. His father, who was born in Germany and grew up with German-speaking parents, ran a barber shop (just like Charlie Brown’s dad). His mother, who never got beyond third grade, came from a clannish, depressive, hard-drinking Norwegian farm family and was one of those people who feel inadequate and superior at the same time. According to Michaelis, she could be distant, cool, even mocking and scornful, and he blames her for most of Sparky’s woes, especially his lifelong feeling of being insufficiently loved.

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Schulz was raised in what sounds like a grim, even more isolated version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon — a close-knit place ruled by church and family, where book learning was regarded with suspicion and where, far from being above average, children were discouraged from thinking too highly of themselves. Early in grammar school, Schulz was bumped ahead a grade, which guaranteed that for the rest of his school career he would always be the smallest, skinniest, most awkward kid in the class. Though a decent pickup hockey player, and a good enough golfer to play No. 2 on the school team, by the time he got to high school Schulz was so crippled with shyness he had become virtually invisible. “I wasn’t actually hated,” he said later. “Nobody cared that much.” His one chance for distinction was lost when some cartoons he had drawn for the school yearbook were unaccountably turned down — a rejection he never forgave, just as he never forgave all the girls who failed to notice that he had worshiped them from afar.

After graduation, Schulz’s shyness and insecurity rendered art school out of the question, so instead he took a correspondence course from Art Instruction Inc., the kind of place that used to advertise on the back of matchbooks. (He found the instruction so helpful that he eventually joined the faculty himself and years later went on the board.) In 1942 Schulz was drafted and, heartsick and terrified, left for boot camp only days after his mother had died. But he actually thrived in the Army and came back newly confident. He even began to go out with girls — though his idea of an appropriate dating present was a Bible. (All his life Schulz was the straightest of arrows: he didn’t smoke, swear or drink, on the grounds that neither did Jesus. The wine at Cana, the young Sparky used to claim, was nonalcoholic.)

In 1951, Schulz married Joyce Halverson, a 22-year-old divorcée with a young daughter from an ill-advised and short-lived marriage to a cowboy. He arranged to adopt the daughter, Meredith, and afterward always insisted she was his, even when the teenage Meredith began to poke around and ask nosy questions. To some degree it was probably a marriage of convenience on both sides, but for a while it was happy enough, and the Schulzes went on to have four children of their own. Sparky was an indifferent and often inattentive father and husband, though, because, self-absorbed and secretly harboring immense ambition, he was really married to his work. After a lot of rejections and false starts, he finally landed a weekly strip, called “Li’l Folks,” with the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and it was syndicated in 1950 by United Feature, which insisted that the title be changed to “Peanuts.” Schulz hated the name but went along, adding this to his ever-growing list of grudges.

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Schulz had initially dreamed of an action strip but began drawing children because that’s what seemed to sell. The earliest strips hit what now seems the authentic Schulzian emotional tone — “Yes, sir! Good ol’ Charlie Brown. ... How I hate him!” — but it took a while for the drawing to evolve, for the heads to enlarge, the limbs to shrink.

“Peanuts” grew slowly at first; caught on hugely in the ’60s, when almost by accident it seemed to speak to everyone who was experiencing the generation gap; and then almost drowned in a licensing binge and flood of tchotchkes. Schulz said yes to everything, no matter how kitschy — toys, cards, books, sweatshirts — until even his fans began to complain he was selling out.

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What saved “Peanuts,” Michaelis suggests, was the elevation of Snoopy into a main character in the late ’60s, and the way his boundless, almost surreal fantasy life frequently took over the strip, which at the same time was being pared down to a visual minimum: a scarf, a helmet, a doghouse indicated by just a few horizontal lines. Another thing that didn’t hurt was the gradual souring of the Schulz marriage. The family was living in Northern California by now, on a sort of private Disneyland with its own stables and miniature golf course and the ice rink (where Schulz like to hold court in the Warm Puppy snack bar) nearby. Despite his success, Schulz was prickly, lonely, depressed and increasingly subject to panic attacks; Joyce felt overburdened and underappreciated. Their feuds, their long bouts of coldness, inspired some of the most Thurber-like stretches of “Peanuts” — the strips where Charlie and Lucy seem to be locked in the eternal struggle of male and female, with the latter always wielding the upper hand.

As Schulz grew into middle age, he filled out, stopped wearing his hair in a buzz cut and discovered that he was actually attractive to women. He had one full-fledged affair, and in 1973, a year or so after divorcing Joyce, he married Elizabeth Jean Forsyth, 16 years his junior, whom he had met — where else? — at the ice rink. This second marriage was happier, in large part because Jeannie, as she was known, saw it her job to make it so. Schulz was often moody and withdrawn nevertheless, and was also compulsively flirty. The evidence suggests that his was essentially an arrested sensibility, locked in adolescent longing and self-absorption. But for a certain kind of artist this is not such a bad thing. Kipling and P. G. Wodehouse suffered, or benefited, from much the same condition: like Schulz, they were truly happy only when transported by their work. Schulz said once that if it weren’t for cartooning he’d be dead, and indeed he died within days of resigning from the strip because of ill health.

In another way, though, Schulz’s is a classic American story: the lonely, misunderstood genius who clings to his dream, finds riches and fame, and discovers that they don’t make him happy after all. He was like Gatsby or Citizen Kane. That he chose the comic strip as his medium links him, on the one hand, to such gifted, pioneering and equally misunderstood figures as Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo, and Krazy Kat’s George Herriman; and on the other, to current practitioners like R. Crumb, Chris Ware and the graphic novelist who goes by the name Seth, who is currently designing “The Complete Peanuts” for Fantagraphics (and who illustrated this review). These younger artists have a far warier relationship to popular success than Schulz did, but they share his themes of loneliness, of loss, of being unable to connect. Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is in many ways Charlie Brown grown, while still an adolescent, to a premature old age. And Crumb offers a window onto what Schulz might have been like if only he had let the anger out.

Michaelis, who had the cooperation of the Schulz family, tells this story brightly and engagingly, if not always succinctly and without repetition. There is rather less than one might expect about the rich tradition of newspaper comics that spawned Schulz, and more than some readers might prefer about, for example, the patterns of metastasis in cervical cancer (the disease that killed Schulz’s mother). Throughout the book Michaelis maintains affection for his subject without losing sight of how exasperating and narcissistic he could be. And the smartest thing he has done is to pepper his pages with actual strips from “Peanuts,” dozens of them, usually without comment or footnote or even date: an appropriate strip just turns up in the middle of a paragraph that happens to be talking about something similar. Sometimes it’s an illustration, sometimes a wry comment. The effect is to continually remind us of why Schulz matters in the first place, and of the potential not just for humor but for feeling and eloquence in the odd and oddly persistent art form where he made his home.

SCHULZ AND PEANUTS A Biography. By David Michaelis. Illustrated. 655 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95.