Lit Du Nord: Minnesota Books and Authors

By Nick Healy

The writerly wisdom of Snoopy

Who is the best writer Minnesota ever produced? Who is the state’s most important writer?

Those questions might be fun to discuss and debate in classrooms or over a cup of coffee, but they are impossible to answer conclusively. Identifying the state’s most read and best loved writer, however, is comparatively simple work. Nobody comes close to Charles Schulz.

As the creator of Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus Van Pelt, Peppermint Patty and the rest of the Peanuts gang, Schulz reached more readers and affected more lives than any other Minnesotan who has made a life as a writer. Some might quibble and point out he was a cartoonist and not a literary author, not purely a writer. But anyone who read Peanuts with care will be unmoved by that argument.

Schulz was the son of a St. Paul barber, and after World War II, he lived for a time in an apartment above his father’s Selby Avenue barbershop while pursuing his dream of becoming a professional cartoonist. His Peanuts strip debuted in 1950, running in seven U.S. newspapers.

Fifty years later, Schulz died on the day before his final Peanuts strip was scheduled to run in Sunday papers. By that time, Peanuts was appearing in 2,600 papers around the world. And, of course, his strips live on in reprints in many newspapers and in paperback compilations.

Comic strips are supposed to be funny, of course, and often Schulz’s

work was good for a laugh. But while it could be silly and sweet, it also connected to more complicated realities of childhood — and of life at any age. To get a sense of how Peanuts affected individuals and the broader culture, there’s no better place to look than “The Peanuts Papers,” a 2019 book published by the Library of Charles strip. Schultz is the creator of the “Peanuts” comic America. “The Peanuts Papers” includes an engaging mix of essays (along with dashes of poetry and comics) from 33 well-known writers, and each has something interesting to say about when and why Peanuts became important in their lives and how it altered their perspective lastingly. “It was reading Peanuts, lying on the floor beneath the piano in my parents’ suburban home in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, that I first saw evidence of the terrible truth: that my adorable parents resided in a cartoon universe. It was Charlie Brown and his friends — children who lived in a world defined by unrequited love — who resided in the real one,” writes Jennifer Finney Boylan, a New York Times opinion writer and the author of several novels and a best-selling memoir, “She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.” In the anthology, novelists and essayists such as Ann Patchett, George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen are joined by cultural commentators and thinkers Gerald Early, Maxine Hong Kingston and David Hajdu and by familiar voices “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

mass-market paperbacks her grandmother had chosen from a drugstore rack. In compilations with titles like “You’ve Had It, Charlie Brown,” Snoopy often sat at a typewriter and endeavored to write a novel of his own, and he modeled important aspects of a creative life.

“Snoopy didn’t just write his novels, he sent them out. In those dark days before electronic submissions, he taught me what it would mean to stand in front of a mailbox, waiting to hear from an editor. He taught me — I cannot emphasize this enough — that I would fail,” Patchett explains.

In Schulz’s comics, Snoopy received piles of rejection letters from editors, and he failed in other pursuits. (Remember how the biplane he flew as a World War I ace was often marred by bullet holes?) Still, that little dog endured.

“He was willing to lose, even in the stories he imagined for himself,” Patchett writes. “He lost, and he continued to be cool, which is to say, he was still himself in the face of both failure and success.”

Nick Healy is an author and freelance writer in Mankato.

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