Joanne Greenberg

I was just looking at “I Never Promised You an Apple Orchard”: The collected Writings of SNOOPY, a 1976 storybook by Schulz (which is largely gags taken from the strip, although the art is all new), and I saw that it was dedicated “For Joanne Greenberg, of course”. Of course.

So being my ignorant li’l self, I had to look it up. Joanne Greenberg is the real person who wielded the name “Hannah Green” to write the 1964 novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a semi-autobiographical tale about teenaged Deborah Blau struggling with mental illness. (She went on to be a professor in creative writing at the Colorado School of Mines, which I’ve always assumed was a school where you could major in being a miner.) So for those of you who thought that Snoopy may have been inspired by the hit 1970 song “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden”, nope. It was inspired by Greenberg, writing as Green, about herself as Blau. Of course.

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