It’s this splintered emotional drama that draws the attention of many others, including George Saunders, who sees the different segments of the self in “Peanuts” — “Charlie Brown as the tender loss-dreading part of me, Linus as the part that tried to address the loss-dreading part via intellect or religion or wit, Lucy as the part that addressed the loss-dreading part via aggression, Snoopy via joyful absurdist sagery.”

The book’s most inspired match of writer to subject is Peter D. Kramer’s entry on Lucy’s work as a psychoanalyst, which to my mind is like having Clayton Kershaw write about Charlie Brown’s pitching career.

Kramer takes Lucy’s practice (and her insistence on her five-cent fee) just seriously enough, playfully but profoundly drawing lines between her methods and those of influential 20th-century American therapists like Harry Stack Sullivan. He even finds value in her go-to advice: “Snap out of it!” “We are free to imagine that Charlie Brown gains something from Lucy’s brusque response,” Kramer writes. “He is being thrown back on his own resources, with the message that they may be more substantial than he believes. Lucy as therapist, I am suggesting, does not go entirely against the grain.” (An opposite and equally convincing line comes from Adam Gopnik: “Lucy is the least fit person to offer psychiatric advice in the history of fiction.”)

Many of the admirers gathered here were creative and probably wistful American kids in the Schulz vein: the Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, Chuck Klosterman, Rick Moody. One might be a little — or a ton — more surprised to find Umberto Eco in the table of contents. (He writes of Charlie Brown’s attempts to kick the football: “What weapons can arrest impeccable bad faith when one has the misfortune to be pure of heart?”) Most of the pieces in this book are original, though Eco’s appeared in The New York Review of Books in 1985. Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Duck Boy,” a brief essay that first appeared in The Times in 1977, is about her experience teaching a troubled teenager. It’s a bracing but not very “Peanuts”-centric bit of work, jarring among the others.

Image Andrew Blauner, editor of “The Peanuts Papers,” an anthology of writing about the comic strip. Credit...

Some writers shine their light on one particular character: Ann Patchett on Snoopy; Mona Simpson on Schroeder; Elissa Schappell on Charlie Brown’s sister, Sally. Numerous contributors mention the running psychological portrait of Charlie Brown’s unrequited crush on the Little Red-Haired Girl — who, like Norm’s wife, Vera, in “Cheers,” never actually appears.