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Charles M. Schulz
1922–2000 · 78 years Tier I
He drew all 17,897 of them himself, and took one vacation
An uncle named him Sparky, after a horse in a comic strip, and it stuck for 77 years. He was the only child of a St. Paul barber. In 1937 he sent Ripley's Believe It or Not a drawing of the family dog, who ate pins and tacks, and Ripley printed it: drawn by Sparky. After high school came a correspondence course from Art Instruction Schools. His mother died of cervical cancer at 50 in February 1943, the year he was conscripted, and he went to Europe leading a machine gun squad with the 20th Armored Division. He came home with a Combat Infantryman Badge he was proud of all his life. In June 1950 he proposed to an Art Instruction bookkeeper named Donna Mae Johnson, who married someone else.
Li'l Folks ran in the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1947 to 1950, four one-panel gags an issue, and there he first used the name Charlie Brown. When the paper dropped it he carried it to United Feature Syndicate, which wanted the four-panel version and refused to keep the title, because Little Folks was already trademarked. A production manager had noticed that the children in the Howdy Doody audience were called the peanut gallery. Schulz accepted the name because he had no choice. The strip started on October 2, 1950, in seven newspapers, and the Sunday page followed on January 6, 1952. He drew every panel of it himself. By the 1980s his hand shook so badly from essential tremor that he had to hold his own wrist, and the line went visibly unsteady, and he still refused help.
On April 15, 1968, 11 days after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, a Los Angeles schoolteacher named Harriet Glickman wrote and asked him to put a Black child in the strip. He answered on the 26th that he had thought about it and was afraid of patronizing. They kept writing to each other. Franklin appeared on July 31. A Southern editor wrote that he did not mind a Black character but asked that the children not be shown in school together, and Schulz did not reply. When the syndicate's president pressed him to change it, he said: print it the way I draw it, or I quit. Nothing else in half a century made the most agreeable man in American newspapers threaten to walk.
Small strokes and a blocked aorta in November 1999 turned up a colorectal cancer that had already spread. He announced his retirement on December 14 and told a television interviewer that he had always assumed he would draw into his eighties, and that it had been taken away from him. He died in his sleep of a heart attack on February 12, 2000. The last original strip ran the next morning, exactly as he had predicted, because the strips were always drawn weeks ahead. He asked that nobody else ever draw Peanuts, and the syndicate has honored it, running reruns instead. Congress had introduced his Gold Medal bill two days before he died.
Lifespan
Charles M. Schulz's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
Li'l Folks
other
Weekly one-panel gags for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the first Charlie Brown 1947 -
Peanuts
other
Ran in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries by the time he stopped 1950 -
Happiness Is a Warm Puppy
book
42 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list 1962 -
A Charlie Brown Christmas
television
The first Peanuts special, and an Emmy. Linus reads from Luke 1965 -
A Boy Named Charlie Brown
film
The first Peanuts feature. He wrote or co-wrote all four 1969 -
Redwood Empire Ice Arena
building
Built in Santa Rosa, with a snack bar called the Warm Puppy Cafe 1969
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1937 aged ~15 Ripley's Believe It or Not prints his drawing of the family dog The credit line read: drawn by Sparky.
- February 1943 aged 20 His mother Dena dies of cervical cancer at 50
- 1943 aged ~21 Conscripted, and sent to Europe leading a machine gun squad
- June 1950 aged 27 Donna Mae Johnson turns down his proposal The little red-haired girl in the strip never appears on the page.
- October 2, 1950 aged 27 Peanuts begins in seven newspapers under a title he hated
- July 31, 1968 aged 45 Franklin appears, after a schoolteacher's letter and a threat to quit
- May 8, 1988 aged 65 Two masked gunmen enter his house intending to kidnap his wife They ran when his daughter drove up. Nobody was hurt.
- December 14, 1999 aged 77 Announces his retirement a month after the cancer diagnosis I did not take this away from me, he told an interviewer.
- February 12, 2000 aged 77 Dies in his sleep, the night before the last original strip runs
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Roy Lichtenstein 1923–1997Arts & LettersPop artist whose comic-strip-inspired paintings became icons of 1960s American art.