Each generation has its iconic touchstones, creations that capture something in the zeitgeist, that speak to their audience in a way that both reflects and shapes the culture. Every once in a while, one of those will resonate with the next generation and even the next, although often what speaks to the younger audience will be somewhat different than what captured the first. Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, with its iconic characters including Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, and Snoopy, has entertained readers and then viewers for 75 years. Teachers and librarians who want to help students appreciate Peanuts in even more detail will find a wealth of resources in Gale In Context: U.S. History.
Charles M. Schulz was born in 1922 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was an only child who was advanced enough to skip two grades in elementary school, but that meant that he was smallest boy in his class when he got to junior high. He was often lonely and struggled with rejection, facts that won’t surprise those who are familiar with Charlie Brown’s regular challenges.
Schulz didn’t name his most famous character after himself. Instead, Charlie Brown was named after an instructor that Schulz worked with at a Minneapolis art school after World War II. Schulz also worked at a comic magazine after the war, and by 1947 he was creating a weekly cartoon for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He drew four different single-panel cartoons, rather than the three- or four-panel comic strip Peanuts would become. Initially, it was called Li’l Folks. The Pioneer Press dropped the strip after a few years, and when United Feature Syndicate agreed to pick it up in 1950, the company changed the name to Peanuts, a decision Schulz would still be grousing about decades later.
Newspaper comic strips date to the 1890s, and it didn’t take long for them to become popular. A survey in 1924 showed that 82 percent of all children read them regularly, and by the 1930s the rate was 70 percent of adults. The mid-twentieth century was a time when even medium-sized towns had multiple newspapers, and cities had newspapers with both a morning and afternoon edition. Television was becoming the dominant entertainment medium, but people still read newspapers, and Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon quickly became the comic strip that people read the most.
Whether it would’ve done just as well with the name of Li’l Folks, is unknown, but by the end of the 1950s, Peanuts appeared in more than 400 U.S. newspapers as well as 35 overseas. Unlike other comic strips when it debuted, it featured only children. If adults were in any of the stories, they were always out of view. Collections of the strips soon appeared in book form and were a staple of every library I ever visited as a kid. I can honestly say I read some of the books dozens of times. Eventually, Peanuts would appear in newspapers in 75 countries in 21 languages with 355 million readers. A series of television specials became holiday classics.
I remember twenty years ago talking with a teenager and was surprised to hear how much she and her friends still enjoyed Peanuts. And the dog, Snoopy, was her favorite character as had been the case for many of the strip’s fans. As someone who identified most with Linus, I have always found people’s embrace of Snoopy a bit strange, but I’m sure that says more about me than it does about them. Any reader who identifies most with Lucy, however, should probably keep that to themselves. Lucy typically comes off as opinionated and self-important. In case you’re wondering, the first strip that involves Lucy pulling the football away from the gullible Charlie Brown appeared in 1952, just two years after Peanuts began. Rejection was knit into the strip’s very fabric. Maybe that helps explain its continued appeal. Long live Charlie Brown!
Meet the Author
J. Robert Parks is a former professor and frequent contributor to Gale In Context: U.S. History and Gale In Context: World History who enjoys thinking about how our understanding of history affects and reflects contemporary culture.