Charles M. Schulz

Charles Monroe “Sparky” Schulz was an American cartoonist, born on November 26, 1922, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in nearby Saint Paul. He became best known as the creator of Peanuts, the comic strip that brought Charlie Brown and Snoopy into newspapers around the world. The nickname “Sparky” came from an uncle, after the horse Spark Plug in Billy DeBeck’s comic strip Barney Google, which Schulz enjoyed reading as a boy.

Schulz’s interest in drawing began early. He sometimes drew his family dog, Spike, who was known for eating unusual things such as pins and tacks. In 1937, Schulz sent a drawing of Spike to Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and it appeared in Robert Ripley’s syndicated panel. At Saint Paul Central High School, Schulz played baseball, golf, and ice hockey, though his drawings were rejected by the school yearbook. After graduating, he took a correspondence course from Art Instruction Schools.

In November 1942, Schulz was drafted into the United States Army. He served in Europe during World War II as a staff sergeant with the 20th Armored Division and as a squad leader on a .50 caliber machine gun team. His unit saw combat near the end of the war, and he received the Combat Infantryman Badge. In February 1943, while he was in the Army, his mother died at age 50 after a long battle with cervical cancer. Schulz later spoke of his sadness that she never saw his work published.

After returning to Minnesota in late 1945, Schulz did lettering for the Roman Catholic comic magazine Timeless Topix. In 1946 he began working at Art Instruction, reviewing and grading students’ work while developing his own career. There he proposed marriage to a redhaired accountant, Donna Johnson, who turned him down. Johnson later inspired the Little Red-Haired Girl, Charlie Brown’s unrequited love in Peanuts.

Schulz’s first regular cartoons, Li’l Folks, ran in the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1947 to 1950. In 1950 he reworked the idea as a four-panel comic strip and submitted it to United Feature Syndicate, which renamed it Peanuts. The strip first appeared on October 2, 1950, in seven newspapers, with a Sunday page beginning in 1952. Over nearly 50 years, Schulz drew 17,897 published Peanuts strips. At its height, the strip ran in 2,600 papers in 75 countries and 21 languages.

Schulz also helped write animated television specials and four animated films based on his characters, beginning with A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. His book Happiness is a Warm Puppy, published in 1962, spent 42 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. He was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983, the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1996, and, after his death on February 12, 2000, the United States Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2007. His work still matters because it joined plain speech, familiar disappointments, and small comic moments in characters readers could recognize at once.