In 1978, when I first saw a Peanuts comic strip featuring Sally Brown’s new friend—a girl she’d met at summer camp—the name Charles Schulz had given the character wasn’t a familiar one. The name wasn’t one I’d even remember, at least not until recently, when I read Simon Beecroft’s The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Strip.
When I spotted her in Beecroft’s book, I immediately recognized the girl with the long brown hair capped with a purple tuque, but I had no memory of her name. Undoubtedly, her name had escaped me because eight years had passed between the time I had first encountered her in the panels of Peanuts and my introduction to the writer who inspired her name.
In 1986, I enrolled in my first creative writing class at UNC-Chapel Hill, English 23W, Introduction to Fiction Writing, taught by James Seay. The textbook Professor Seay had chosen for the course was an anthology that included “Why I Live at the P.O.,” a short story that delighted me with the narrator’s description of her uncle, “suddenly appear[ing] in the hallway in one of Stella-Rondo’s flesh-colored kimonos, all cut on the bias” (Welty 48). The woman who wrote those words became—and remains—one of my favorite writers. When I saw her first name in my sophomore textbook, I thought I was seeing that name for the first time. Only recently, forty years later, was I reminded that my first glimpse of the name Eudora was in a speech balloon penned by Charles Schulz. Seeing Sally Brown’s friend Eudora for the first time since 1978 prompted me to wonder whether that brown-haired girl in the purple tuque was named for Eudora Welty.
Beecroft answers my question in his book and notes that Schulz referred to meeting Welty as “really one of the great moments of my whole life” (158). Beecroft also mentions that Welty held Schulz’s “writerly qualities” (158) in high regard: “[T]he way he had imagined the inside of Snoopy’s doghouse but left it to the reader’s imagination. ‘That’s so good,’ Welty said. ‘A writer has to know all about the inside of a thing even if he is just going to show a little bit of it’” (158).
Long before I developed an appreciation for literary fiction, I was enamored with the comic art of Charles Schulz. Was the future writer in me drawn to something in Schulz’s panels that led to my devotion to the written word, some “writerly qualities” I could not yet name?
In her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty distinguishes chronological time from the order that we as storytellers give to events: “[I]n their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow” (69).
Though I first met her namesake eight years before I read Welty’s fiction, the chronology of my writer’s narrative places Schulz’s Eudora second. Only after rediscovering her in the pages of Beecroft’s book did I remember her name. And now she and Welty remain bound in my mind by what Welty would call “the continuous thread of revelation” (69).
Works Cited
Beecroft, Simon. The Peanuts Book: A Visual History of the Iconic Strip. DK/Penguin Random House, 2020.
Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. Harvard University Press, 1984.
—. “Why I Live at the P.O.” 1941. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. pp 46-56.
Jane Lucas 