[Charles Schulz's] autobiographical memoir Peanuts Jubilee reads almost like a story, a myth of middle America. However modestly told, it must be a great success story….

The memoir gives the real-life origin of many Peanuts events and characters. But this is a little deceptive: Mr Schulz often divulges less than he seems to.

He would have us think of him as the real Charlie Brown, a loser, stimulated to creativity by failures or disappointments in love. But if Charlie Brown ever wrote a comic strip, it would not be successful like Peanuts: it would be an international flop. Mr Schulz, we feel, must have something in him of Schroeder and Lucy—to say nothing of that typewriter ace Snoopy….

[The technical accounts of Mr Schulz's art] are not exactly secrets. About his own development away from gag cartooning, he is interesting but more reserved…. What is one to...