LIT DU NORD: MINNESOTA BOOKS AND AUTHORS By Nick Healy
The writerly wisdom of Snoopy
W
ho is the best writer work was good for a laugh. But Minnesota ever produced? while it could be silly and sweet, it Who is the state’s most also connected to more complicated important writer? realities of childhood — and of life at Those questions might be fun to any age. To get a sense of how Peanuts discuss and debate in classrooms or over a cup affected of coffee, individuals and the but they are impossible broader to answer culture, conclusively. there’s no better Identifying t h e s t a t e ’s place to look most read than “The and best Peanuts loved writer, Papers,” a however, is comparatively 2019 book simple work. published Nobody by the comes close Library of America. t o C h a r l e s Charles Schultz is the creator of the “Peanuts” comic strip. Schulz. “The As the creator of Snoopy, Charlie Peanuts Papers” includes an Brown, Linus Van Pelt, Peppermint engaging mix of essays (along with Patty and the rest of the Peanuts dashes of poetry and comics) from gang, Schulz reached more readers 33 well-known writers, and each has and affected more lives than any something interesting to say about other Minnesotan who has made a when and why Peanuts became life as a writer. Some might quibble important in their lives and how it and point out he was a cartoonist altered their perspective lastingly. and not a literary author, not purely a “It was reading Peanuts, lying on writer. But anyone who read Peanuts the floor beneath the piano in my with care will be unmoved by that parents’ suburban home in Newtown argument. Square, Pennsylvania, that I first saw Schulz was the son of a St. Paul evidence of the terrible truth: that my adorable parents resided in a cartoon barber, and after World War II, he lived for a time in an apartment above universe. It was Charlie Brown and his father’s Selby Avenue barbershop his friends — children who lived in a while pursuing his dream of world defined by unrequited love — becoming a professional cartoonist. who resided in the real one,” writes His Peanuts strip debuted in 1950, Jennifer Finney Boylan, a New York running in seven U.S. newspapers. Times opinion writer and the author Fifty years later, Schulz died on the of several novels and a best-selling day before his final Peanuts strip was memoir, “She’s Not There: A Life in scheduled to run in Sunday papers. Two Genders.” By that time, Peanuts was appearing In the anthology, novelists and in 2,600 papers around the world. essayists such as Ann Patchett, And, of course, his strips live on in George Saunders and Jonathan reprints in many newspapers and in Franzen are joined by cultural paperback compilations. commentators and thinkers Gerald Comic strips are supposed to be Early, Maxine Hong Kingston and funny, of course, and often Schulz’s David Hajdu and by familiar voices 46 • APRIL 2022 • MANKATO MAGAZINE
“The Peanuts Papers” Edited by Andrew Blauner including Ira Glass, host of public radio’s “This American Life,” and Chuck Klosterman, the writer and journalist behind books such as “Fargo Rock City,” “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” and, most recently, “The Nineties.” For anyone who has ever chased dreams of being a writer or an artist of another stripe, Patchett’s essay should be mandatory reading. She describes summertime visits to her grandparents’ home in Paradise, California, where she got a break from a childhood that was strained after her parents divorced and her mother took her to live on the other side of the country. “I found Snoopy in Paradise the way another kid might have found God,” writes Patchett, the admired author of novels including “Bel Canto,” “State of Wonder” and “The Dutch House,” and the 2022 essay collection “These Precious Days,” a wonder in its own right. Patchett explains that she was an introverted kid and an indifferent reader who found company and inspiration in a pile of Peanuts
