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His mother died on a Monday. She was buried on Friday. And on Saturday, the lonesome young man was barreling across the Midwest in an olive-green troop train, on his way to World War II. When Charles Schulz told his own life story, he never recounted the early years but began with the week of March 1, 1943, when Dena Halverson Schulz died after a long illness and, as he saw it, his life began again from scratch. He had spent the night outside his mother's roof only twice in his life. But when David Michaelis tells the story in his new biography, we get a 130-page head start on the man consumers of pop culture think they know well, as "Good Ol' Charlie Brown."

Mr. Schulz, we learn, had an early sense of his own ability and was eager to impress his relatives with his quality. But he felt that outsiders, including what came to be an unprecedented worldwide audience, didn't need to know his story: "If somebody reads my strip every day," he would say," they'll know me for sure. They'll know exactly what I am."

And while Mr. Michaelis' book is rich in revelation, the treat for Schulz fans is that every nugget proves Mr. Schulz, and thus themselves, right. The creator of Peanuts, a shy kid who was on the sidelines of family gatherings "always drawing," is no cipher to us: We always understood him from his work.

A lonely boy – the author describes him at school as a "class of one" – marched off to war to become a lonely man, pining to be understood and to be taken care of.

His few Army buddies were bemused by the 19-year-old finicky eater, sensitive to profanity in the profane world of the soldier. He didn't drink, because it reminded him of drunken relatives of his youth – and what he might become if he didn't look out.

Unlike Bill Mauldin, whose enduring images of the war were celebrated by the Army, Mr. Schulz couldn't find refuge in his art even as a sign-painter. "What we need in this outfit," Bravo Company's master sergeant said as the young private displayed his proficiency in lettering, "are riflemen, not artists."

But if the military didn't take art from Pvt. Schulz, it certainly gave it to him.

As Mr. Michaels relates, those were perhaps the only days in his life when his immediate circle didn't address him as "Sparky," his nickname almost from birth. The book is illustrated with Peanuts strips drawn from that life experience: A lonely Charlie Brown goes off to camp; Snoopy battles the Red Baron. But the soldier's eventual maturity shows through, too. In a Halloween strip years later, Charlie Brown organizes a trick-or-treat expedition like a military campaign.

In wartime Germany, the soldier deployed his hand-eye coordination not as a sign-painter but an expert marksman, and his evolving joy at being part of something bigger than himself led him down the surprising road to platoon leader, where he was admired for his humor and empathy. Near the end of the war he was promoted to staff sergeant, and he wrote home that he was "very proud."

Sparky's pride is a recurrent theme of the book. We see him busting his buttons in 1955 when he was honored by the National Cartoonist Society, but we also see him walk out of the annual banquet a year earlier when he was primed to get the society's top award – but didn't.

Some Schulz family members have complained that Mr. Michaelis inaccurately paints an image of a cold, depressed man. "The whole thing is completely wrong," daughter Amy Schulz Johnson told The New York Times. "I think he wanted to write a book a certain way, and so he used our family."

Mr. Michaelis responded that after doing research that included hundreds of interviews, "this was the man I found."

In the end, his willingness to discuss his subject's faults makes the artist a real person in an era that has made him saintly. Mr. Michaelis' diligent research will make fans and historians appreciate the ambitious but tongue-tied man who produced a $1.2 billion-a-year empire all the more.

"I've been trying in the last couple of years to show how these little kids are searching for something," Mr. Schulz wrote in 1972. That search was to continue for nearly 30 more years, as he struggled with his aloneness through his first marriage, an affair, and even a second marriage with a woman who may have best shared his world view. But even then, as Charlie Brown struggles with the question of whether one can be in love with two people at the same time, Sparky's heart was revealed only in Peanuts.

"Anybody who says Peanuts is cute is just crazy," he said of some critics. There [are] a lot of bitter and sarcastic things in [it]. I think it's very real. I think you can be real without being vulgar."

The man who coined the phrase "happiness is a warm puppy" saw no contradiction there. "I never said it wasn't more complicated," he said, voice cracking with anger at the criticism. "But ... I defy [the critic] to give me a better definition of what happiness is."

Mike Peters is a freelance writer in Anchorage, Alaska.

A Biography

David Michaelis

(HarperCollins, $34.95)

Available Tuesday

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