Where do you get your ideas?

I'm not sure when this originally ran, but it must have been sometime after October 2007, when the Peanuts book was first released.

Where do you get your ideas?

It is a question many of us would like to ask the creative people whose works we enjoy – artists, novelists, composers and filmmakers who chart new worlds or who combine familiar elements in unfamiliar ways – even though we realize they have been asked hundreds of times.

For Charles Schulz, creator of “Peanuts,” the answer to that cringe-inducing question was most likely “everywhere”– his own insecurities, family, fellow artists and faith – even when he denied it was so.

This is evident from a new biography, “Schulz and Peanuts,” by David Michaelis. Again and again, Michaelis demonstrates how Schulz drew from even the homeliest details of his own life to create what was essentially a thinly veiled autobiography coded into the deceptively simple squiggles that became Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and the rest of the Peanuts gang.

Schulz’s WWII experiences – leaving home for boot camp shortly after his mother’s death, surprising himself by coming out of a self-imposed shell to be a leader, his service in France and Germany – transmogrified into Charlie Brown’s experiences at summer camp (he becomes well-respected before returning home to anonymity) and Snoopy’s prowling of the war-ravaged countryside as a World War I flying ace.

Similarly, Schulz’s failed romances earlier in life became the impetus for Charlie Brown’s unrequited love, the Little Red-Haired Girl; childhood trips to the movies with his grandmother inspired a memorable strip where Charlie Brown is fearful his grandmother will leave the theater after the newsreel; and his cousin Patty and her roommate Elise led to the creation of Peppermint Patty and Marcie.

Schulz was a magnet, metaphorically drawing these ideas to himself and then literally drawing them onto the Bristol boards he shipped to United Feature Syndicate.

He took a working-class upbringing, filled with the requisite share of hits and misses, and parlayed it into a goldmine. Only last week, on a Forbes list of top-earning dead celebrities, Schulz was number three, behind cultural icons Elvis and John Lennon and ahead of luminaries like George Harrison and Albert Einstein.

Sometimes, when reporters asked Schulz if he was Charlie Brown, he answered yes. Increasingly, later in life, he would become more philosophical, noting that he modeled aspects of Charlie Brown clearly after himself, but not entirely.

Creative people always reveal pieces of themselves in their works, whether they intend to or not. Edgar Allan Poe, orphaned at an early age and all but abandoned later by the family who took him in, wrote always of alienation, isolation and loss, although these themes were dressed up in the rags of gothic fiction as premature burials, pestilence and insanity.

In the same vein (pun intended), Alfred Hitchcock’s films betray – among other things – a man fascinated by aloof women, especially blondes. Steely blondes meet ghastly fates in at least three of his movies – Kim Novak falls to her death from a bell tower after being remade a blonde by an obsessed James Stewart in “Vertigo,” Janet Leigh is knifed to death in the shower by a character with his own women/mother issues in “Psycho,” and poor Tippi Hedren endures a horrific winged attack in “The Birds.”

Hitchcock did not write his own screenplays, but he was definitely instrumental in their creation and evolution.

Would Poe, who wrote about the art of writing, have recognized his tortured past in his own work? Would Hitchcock?

In both, we can see evidence of the puppeteer behind the stage. How much or how little we read into these peeks is up to us, along with how much credibility we give such readings.

Similarly, in each “Peanuts” strip we can almost see Charles Schulz moving his ink-dipped pen across the page, giving life to his characters the way Beethoven, the idol of Schulz’s Schroeder, gave life to one of his symphonies: one captured squiggle at a time.