Charles Schulz, according to biographer David Michaelis, was a tangle of contradictions well beyond the usual. The creator of Peanuts -- all 17,897 strips published over an unparalleled half-century run -- was regarded as a wise and gentle sage by the time of his death at 77 in 2000. He was the prophet who preached with comic wit that life was hard and dogged persistence the greatest of virtues, who kept his blockhead alter ego, Charlie Brown, ever ready to take one more kick at that football. His country loved him for it. Charlie Brown and the gang -- Snoopy perhaps most of all -- became American icons, while Schulz's lifetime income from Peanuts and its merchandise amounted to more than $1 billion. Seven years after his death, his estate still generates millions annually, and Schulz is one of Elvis Presley's few rivals on the Forbes list of "highest paid deceased persons."

But as Michaelis's Schulz and Peanuts(HarperCollins)records in astonishing detail, Schulz coloured his honours and success with bitterness and insecurity, the legacy of a childhood where his parents didn't encourage his artistic talent. He was a first-class grudge collector, who in old age still remembered every "dumb" teacher who failed to notice his genius in elementary school, and nurtured every slight and rejection since. Schulz's friend, Lynn Johnston, the Canadian creator of For Better or For Worse, said of him late in his life, "He's bitter about the little red-haired girl who didn't marry him, he's bitter about his divorce, and he's bitter about getting old.''

Michaelis can tell this intimate tale partly because he had unprecedented access to Schulz's papers, family and friends. Shortly before he died, Schulz, an admirer of painter Andrew Wyeth -- Snoopy has a Wyeth hanging in his doghouse -- was reading Michaelis's biography of Andrew's father, the illustrator N.C. Wyeth. That made Schulz's widow, Jean, receptive to Michaelis's interest in a biography. But all that rich material pales beside the comic strip itself, and the way Michaelis immersed himself in it, with a commitment to detail that borders on mania.

Schulz, the quintessentially reserved Midwesterner, spread his life story across those thousands of panels. Some of the autobiography is obvious: Charles Schulz and Charlie Brown both had fathers who were barbers, and owned dogs with singular imaginations of their own. Both suffered the pangs of unrequited love, essentially for the same woman -- Donna Johnson, who married a fireman in real life, and became immortalized as the Little Red-Haired Girl in Peanuts. Some is much less obvious: when Snoopy's desert-dwelling brother Spike sets out hitchhiking, bearing a sign with Needles written on it, how many readers knew that the cartoonist's first dog and model for Snoopy was named Spike? Or that Schulz spent two miserable boyhood years in the oasis town of Needles, Calif.?

There are more than 200 strips reproduced in the book showcasing Michaelis's eye for the telling detail. Consider a strip in which Snoopy dances with joyful abandon, while Linus remarks to Charlie Brown, "My gramma says that we live in a veil of tears." Charlie's lengthy assent -- yes, this world is full of "sorrow, sadness and despair, grief, agony and woe" -- reduces the beagle to supine immobility. Funny enough on its own, the strip takes on poignancy, while the use of "veil" for "vale" looks less like an error after Michaelis explains the role of Schulz's maternal grandmother in his depressing childhood.

As dour a Norwegian Lutheran as ever lived, Grandmother Sophia was emphatic that joy inevitably provoked disaster: "If you laugh at the dinner table, you'll cry before bed," was a favourite expression. Schulz used to play a spelling game with Sophia, flunking her whenever she made a non-native-speaker's mistake like spelling "know" as "no."

Another set of strips, about Snoopy's crush on a girl dog, retells Schulz's extramarital affair of 1970 to 1971. Long before the real-life relationship petered out, Snoopy, lying on his doghouse in a winter storm, was wondering if it was possible "to be in love with two different snowflakes at the same time?" Not his wife and lover; Charles Schulz was dreaming of the Little Red-Haired Girl again, and actually went to see Donna Johnson for solace as both his affair and his first marriage crumbled around him. In Schulz's world, all love was unrequited, or worse, met with cold indifference. For all its wit and insight, it's that melancholy sadness at Peanuts' heart that made it art.

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