New biography on Charles Schulz announced

New York, NY (February 12, 2001) HarperCollins has acquired world rights for the first major biography of the late Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz in a deal handled by agent Melanie Jackson. Schulz: A Biography, by David Michaelis, author of the critically acclaimed biography N. C. Wyeth, will examine the life of the creator of the internationally beloved cartoon strip featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy. At the time of Schulz's death in February 2000, Peanuts appeared in more than 2600 newspapers in 75 countries.

"David Michaelis's impeccable talents as a biographer and his passion for Schulz and Schulz's contribution to American popular culture made this an irresistible acquisition for us," says Cathy Hemming, publisher of HarperCollins. "As the publisher of many of Schulz's own books, we're especially proud to be associated with this project."

The Schulz estate has granted Michaelis exclusive access to the family and Schulz's papers with regard to a biography, according to acquiring editor Hugh Van Dusen. Remarkably, when Michaelis approached Schulz's widow, Jeannie, with his interest, he learned that Schulz had been reading his Wyeth biography before he died. Michaelis feels a special connection with HarperCollins as well. His grandfather was editor of social and economic books for Harper & Row from 1925 to 1962. "It is wonderful to be able to publish David's book here," says Van Dusen. "I knew his grandfather when I first started at Harper and David will be especially welcome on our list."

"At all levels of society, all over the globe, Charles Schulz and Peanuts had a profound and lasting influence on the way people saw themselves and the world in the second half of the 20th century," says Michaelis. "It's now been exactly a year since Schulz's death, and I still see a gap on the long shelf of Peanuts literature for a full-scale biography that places Schulz where he belongs---in the pantheon of American cultural achievement. For me, it's a privilege and pleasure not only to explore the life and art of this seminal figure with the cooperation of his family and associates, but also to be in partnership with a house that early on shaped my ambitions. Thirty-two years ago, as a 10-year-old wearing a brand-new Linus sweatshirt, I loved to investigate my grandfather Ordway Tead's files and papers and books in his office at Harper & Row and at home. More than anything in the world, except maybe my Linus sweatshirt, I loved feeling my way into another person's past life and being allowed to live its strangeness. Last summer, when Schulz's family invited me into his book-lined studio at One Snoopy Place in Santa Rosa, California, the aroma in that room was the same as that which I recall from my earliest excavations at Harper's---the unfading smell of paper and ink."

HarperCollins, publisher of the bestselling A Charlie Brown Christmas and Peanuts A Golden Celebration, among numerous other Peanuts titles, plans to publish Schulz in 2006.

---

Five Year Licensing Agreement Brings Most Popular Comic Strip in History to Life

February 5, 2001

PRNewswire via COMTEX

Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Woodstock and the rest of the cast of characters will continue the 50th anniversary of Peanuts with an interactive celebration.

Worldwide interactive entertainment publisher Infogrames Inc. (Nasdaq IFGM) announced today that United Media has awarded the company the rights to bring the most popular comic strip in history to all gaming platforms. The exclusive deal is guaranteed through 2006.

The terms of the agreement include the rights for Infogrames to develop Peanuts video games for Sony PlayStation and PlayStation2, Sega Dreamcast, Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo GameCube and Game Boy Advance, PC and Macintosh. Snoopy and the entire Peanuts gang will serve up their first video game with "Snoopy Tennis" for Game Boy Color, available March 2001.

"We are very excited that United Media has entrusted Infogrames with one of the most renowned properties of all time. This deal brings us to the next level with our library of phenomenal licenses," said Robert Miles Watson, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Licensing for Infogrames, Inc. "We are combining the beloved Peanuts characters and more than 50 years of history to create a fun gaming experience for kids of any age through several upcoming titles."

Infogrames is the perfect partner to team up with United Media for Peanuts," said Joshua Kislevitz, Senior Vice President, Licensing for United Media. "They understand content and character integrity while making sure each game is unique and fun."

Peanuts Property

The power and success of Peanuts is unparalleled, with over $1 billion in worldwide retail sales yearly. The most widely syndicated comic strip in history, Peanuts is a global multi-media brand with best-selling books, highly rated television specials, five "Camp Snoopy" theme parks, and blue-chip partners that include ABC, Nickelodeon, Hallmark, and Pillsbury.

---

Snoopy statue turns up for auction on Internet

February 1, 2001

By Karl J. Karlson
The St. Paul Pioneer Press

One of the 101 Snoopy statues from St. Paul's tribute to "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz is up for auction on the Internet as a fund-raiser for its sponsor.

"Bundle of Joy" Snoopy was listed on the auction site eBay last week by Cradle of Hope, a private, nonprofit agency that assists low-income women who are pregnant or new mothers.

Ann Dickinson, one of the artists who decorated the Snoopy statue, said the group had offered the statue on eBay last November but withdrew it after the bidding topped out at $6,100.

"We think it can do better than that. There seems to be a lot of interest, at least locally," she said.

At the same time of Cradle of Hope's efforts, 21 other dogs were being sold in an Internet auction conducted by Sotheby's for St. Paul. Those dogs brought prices ranging from $6,000 to $22,000 each.

In separate private charity auctions last fall, the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts sold its Snoopy for $10,500, and HealthEast sold its statue for $10,000.

"Bundle of Joy" was originally sponsored for $3,000 in the "Peanuts on Parade" tribute to Schulz by Cradle of Hope and the Baby Grand shop on Grand Avenue.

To check on the "Bundle of Joy" auction, search for item No. 548644128 on eBay. As of mid-Wednesday, there had been one bid of $5,000. The auction is scheduled to last through Friday, but Dickinson said she might extend it.

---

Park plan selected for empty city block

January 25, 2001

By Virginia Rybin
St. Paul Pioneer Press

St. Paul will have a new park featuring a meandering brook, bronze figures of "Peanuts" characters and a restaurant on a triangular downtown block that previously was home to a bank.

That was the plan announced Wednesday for the lot at Fifth and St. Peter streets, the former site of a Firstar Bank branch. Billie Young, a member of the executive committee of the St. Paul Riverfront Corp. board, described its features to fellow board members at the organization's quarterly meeting.

The group must raise $2 million to make the plan a reality. It has raised another $2 million for acquiring the block from Firstar in 1999, demolishing the bank and putting in a parking lot, the present use of the site.

"This gives us an opportunity for a strong connection between the entertainment district (RiverCentre and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts) and the retail district on Wabasha" Street, said Patrick Seeb, Riverfront Corp. executive director. He said the plan provides an unobstructed view of Rice Park and "embellishes the look of the Lawson Building, the Hamm Building and Landmark Center."

"There is a great deal of demand for community festival space," Seeb said. He expects that the Firstar block will be used about six times this year for such festivals.

The executive committee of the Riverfront Corp. board has approved the plan. The full board did not vote Wednesday because it lacked a quorum. The Riverfront Corp. will proceed with further design work on the assumption that the plan will be approved at the board's next quarterly meeting, Young said. Seeb said he hopes the park will be completed by the summer of 2002.

Board members and other community leaders who participated in workshops about uses for the block have considered less green space and a larger building. But for at least a year the focus has been on creating a park. The plan calls for mostly grass with brick or some other attractive surface along Market Street.

Before the one-story bank building was built in the 1950s, the triangular block housed the Orpheum Theater, a music hall, several restaurants and a variety of residential buildings.

Young said the $2 million price tag for developing the block as a park does not include the restaurant, the cost of the "Peanuts" characters or fees paid to design firms.

Under the plan, the Riverfront Corp. would find a developer, who would pay for building the cafe at the Fifth Street end of the site and assume the risk if business were not good.

Young said the restaurant, occupying about 5,000 square feet of the block, would have a great deal of glass on its exterior to provide views of the new park, Rice Park and nearby buildings. It would be "a bistro-type cafe, very family friendly, that would offer coffee and pastries in the morning, light meals throughout the day and pre- and post-theater fare in the evening," she said.

Sales of many of the "Peanuts on Parade" Snoopy statues displayed last summer in downtown St. Paul are paying for the memorial to the late cartoonist Charles Schulz, who grew up in St. Paul. Young said the triangle would not be the main site of the memorial but would house some of the bronze figures.

Another, final design workshop for the site will be held Feb. 15-16. Plans call for completing the final design by the end of March. Then the Riverfront Corp. will concentrate on fund raising while the construction design work is done. After that is completed and most or all of the money is raised, the Riverfront Corp. will solicit bids from construction firms.

---

Good Grief, Sparky Schulz!

January 22-26, 2001

By Gloria D. Miklowitz
The Los Angeles Times (children's page)

If you read the comics, you probably know and love "Peanuts." There's Charlie Brown and Lucy, Snoopy the beagle, Linus with his security blanket, the little red-haired girl, and others. They were all created by Charles "Sparky" Schulz, a shy man who began drawing cartoons as a child.

When Schulz was in kindergarten, he drew a man shoveling snow in a storm, with a palm tree in the scene. His teacher said, "Someday, Charles, you're going to be an artist." Today, Schulz's "Peanuts" comics appear in thousands of newspapers throughout the world. "Peanuts" is considered the most successful comic strip in newspaper history.

Born in 1922 to Dena and Carl Schulz of St. Paul, Minnesota, Charles was nicknamed "Sparky" when he was 2 days old. The name came from a horse named "Sparkplug" that appeared in a comic strip called "Barney Google."

From his earliest days, one of Sparky's greatest pleasures was to read the comics with his father, a barber. Sparky bought all the comic books he could find, and drew Buck Rogers, Popeye, Disney characters and others in his notebooks.

Sparky's childhood was happy, with a loving, stable family. He enjoyed playing hockey and ball with his friends. He skipped two grades in elementary school and was the smallest and youngest in his sixth-grade class. Then he reached junior high and high school and failed almost everything.

In high school, he believed he was stupid, and dreaded being called on. Still, he graduated on schedule, spending his spare time cartooning at the dining-room table. He filled scrapbooks with his drawings of Sherlock Holmes, the famous storybook detective.

One evening his mother saw an ad in the paper which read "Do you like to draw? Send for our free talent test." The course cost $170, a lot of money in those days, but his father paid it. Schulz took the lessons by mail, while working. One job, making $16 a week, gave him a chance to draw, but it was 1943. America was at war and Schulz was drafted into the U.S. Army.

Tuesday The war stops Schulz from cartooning.

---

The story so far Charles M. Schulz loved to draw from the time he was in kindergarten.

When Charles Schulz entered the Army in 1943, his mother, who had encouraged his drawing, was dying of cancer. One Sunday evening, on leave to visit her, his mother said, "I suppose we should say goodbye because we probably will never see each other again." She died the next day. Her loss made Schulz very sad and lonely, feelings he later gave to Charlie Brown.

Much of his time in the Army was spent in Kentucky, learning to be a machine gunner. He served in Europe just as World War II was ending.

When he returned from the war, he looked for work in art departments near home, but no one wanted him. He took samples of his work to Timeless Topixs, a Catholic magazine. The art director did not buy his cartoons, but gave him lettering to do on comic strips that others had drawn.

Schulz would get up early, deliver his lettering work, then go to teach at the art school where he had once studied. In the evening, he would letter the comic drawings, often working until midnight. Soon he was drawing the words for comics in French and Spanish, although he didn't know what the words meant.

Schulz came up with the idea of using tiny kids as subjects for cartoons. The first of these cartoons ran in Timeless Topixs. A friend suggested he show samples of his "kids" to the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper. He did, calling the panels "Li'l Folks." The paper ran his comics for two years.

During this time, he was also drawing and sending cartoons to magazines, in hopes of selling them, but without much luck. The first acceptance came from the Saturday Evening Post. The letter read, "Check Tuesday for spot drawing of boy on lounge." He thought that meant his drawing was being returned, but it meant the magazine was buying it! He sold 15 cartoons to that magazine between 1948 and 1950.

Wednesday Was Schulz on his way to becoming a real cartoonist?

---

The story so far Charles M. Schulz's persistence has paid off, with sales of his cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post, a major magazine.

In 1950, Charles M. Schulz sent samples of his work to United Feature Syndicate in New York. A syndicate can sell an artist or writer's work to many newspapers at once, bringing in more money. After weeks of not hearing anything, Schulz wrote again. Finally the editorial director answered, inviting him to New York to talk about his work.

Schulz arrived at the syndicate office early one morning, before the director arrived. He left drawings of a new comic strip he'd been working on and went to breakfast. When he returned to the office, he found the staff excited about the strip. They offered him a contract for five years but changed the name of the strip from "Li'l Folks" to "Peanuts." Schulz never liked the name. He said it was confusing and undignified, that no one ever called small children "peanuts."

The strip appeared for the first time, on Oct. 2, 1950, in nine newspapers. By the end of the first year, 35 newspapers carried it; the next year, 45, and ore each year after that. Only four characters appeared in the first strip Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Shermy and Patty. In future years the cast increased to Schroeder, Lucy and Linus, Sally (Charlie's sister), Frieda, Franklin, Woodstock, Pigpen and Marcie.

With the certainty of an income, Schulz bought a new car, the first he had ever owned. He also proposed marriage to a red-haired girl he was dating and loved, but she married someone else. In his comic strip, Charlie Brown is always trying to get the little "red haired girl" to like him.

Schulz always worked six weeks ahead of deadline, doing his own drawing, inking, lettering and story lines. Imagine having to come up with a new idea each day of the year, for 50 years!

Despite success, Schulz often felt depressed and fearful of change. He said he was a worrier, and so, Charlie Brown had to be a worrier too.

Thursday What effect did "Peanuts" have on its readers?

---

The story so far Charles M. Schulz worked long hours, seven days a week and 'Peanuts' became famous.

"Peanuts" touches people because Charles M. Schulz wrote from his own life and feelings. He believed that happiness was about simple things, like supper, a soaring kite, or jumping in a pile of leaves. "Happiness is a warm puppy," he wrote.

Still, he saw himself as the boy whose artwork was rejected for the high school yearbook or the loser who was rejected by a little red-haired girl.

"I was a bland, stupid-looking kid who started off badly and failed everything," he once told a reporter.

Snoopy, the beagle, was based on his childhood dog Spike. At first Snoopy was just a cute puppy, but by the 1960s, the dog's thoughts were shown in balloons over his head. It gave Schulz many possibilities. Who can forget Snoopy as the Red Baron, a World War I flying ace, flying an imaginary airplane, the Sopwith Camel? Or Snoopy sitting on top of his dog house? Through the years we came to know every item in his dog house--a Ping-Pong table, a pool table, bunk beds, a Van Gogh painting, a whirlpool.

One of Schulz's most famous cartoons was to commemorate D-day, the day Allied forces landed on French soil during World War II. It showed Snoopy, as a soldier with a helmet, making his way through the surf to shore.

In 1951, Schulz married Joyce Halvorsen. They moved to Santa Rosa in Northern California where they raised five children in a house his wife designed. He and his wife divorced in 1972.

Schulz got some of his ideas for the comic strip from his own children. Linus' security blanket was based on Schulz seeing his own children dragging blankets around the house.

In 1965, "Peanuts" was made into a television special "A Charlie Brown Christmas." It became a holiday classic, with jazz music and children's voices. "Peanuts" has been featured in more than 50 TV specials, four feature films, more than 1,400 books and countless products.

Friday Snoopy goes into space.

---

The story so far Charles M. Schulz's 'Peanuts' gains worldwide fame.

A highlight in Charles M. Schulz's life came when Apollo 10 was launched. NASA named the command module Charlie Brown and the lunar module Snoopy. Schulz said there was "never a Beagle who flew a Sopwith Camel one day and a spacecraft the next!"

The worldwide success of "Peanuts" brought fame and great income to the shy man who loved to draw cartoons as a child. Forbes magazine estimated that Schulz earned $33 million in 1995-96. But "Sparky" lived a simple life. He owned an ice-skating rink in Santa Rosa, where he skated almost every day and played in an ice-hockey league with friends. It was there he met Jeannie Forsyth, his second wife. A simple, good man, he didn't like to travel but enjoyed his family and home, reading and his work.

In 1998, the Schulzes donated $5 million to a new library at Sonoma State, his wife's college. They often wrote checks to friends in need, without being asked.

Although Sparky cried when ill health forced him to retire in December 1999, he said it would give him more time to focus on his health and family without the worry of a daily deadline.

Schulz died of colon cancer on Feb. 12, 2000, at age 77. Condolences came in from all over the world.

---

St. Paul officials try to gauge impact of Peanuts on Parade

January 15, 2001

The Associated Press

City officials estimated that 450,000 people visited St. Paul last summer to track down many of the 101 Snoopy statues scattered around downtown and city neighborhoods as part of the hometown tribute to the late "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz.

Officials at the St. Paul Convention and Visitors Bureau came up with the figure but said that it is an educated guess based on the number of inquiries the bureau received. The event ran from June through September.

The agency made no estimate of the event's financial impact.

Mayor Norm Coleman said that while the city would like to build upon the success of the original, he does not think a copycat version -- with different Peanuts characters, for example -- would be as successful.

"Do we try to build on the success of 'Peanuts on Parade'? Or do we accept the idea that the sequel is never better than the original?" Coleman said.

The event's success in drawing people to town -- as many as 40,000 on some Sundays -- has created a public expectation that St. Paul will be a fun place to come, where there will be something to do and see, Coleman said.

Coleman said visitors from all 50 states, seven Canadian provinces and 52 countries signed in at the special "Dog House" information booth in front of the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Whatever the city does, if it involves Schulz and his characters, will require approval from his family and United Media, the company that controls the images of the cartoon characters. Megan Ryan, director of the city's marketing and promotion office, said that negotiations are being held with both.

More than $1 million was raised from the auction of 63 of the dogs. The money will be used for scholarships at two area art schools and to create a permanent tribute to Schulz in downtown St. Paul. Current planning calls for a group of 10 bronze sculptures, about 4 feet high, of Schulz characters at one site.

Another possibility is scattering the sculptures around St. Paul, an attraction that would draw people to various parts of the city. Decisions on both next summer's plans and the permanent tribute are expected within the month, Coleman said.

---

Passages: The Life & Times of Charles Schulz

January 5, 2001

With a sharp sense of humor and a keen understanding of alienation, Charles Schulz made 'Peanuts' an indispensable cultural touchstone. Author David Michaelis, who is writing the first full-scale biography,offers an appreciation of the complex cartoonist.

By David Michaelis
Time magazine

On October 2, 1950, at the height of the American postwar celebration — an era when being unhappy was an antisocial rather than a personal emotion — a 27-year-old Minnesota cartoonist named Charles M. Schulz introduced to the funny papers a group of children who told one another the truth:

"I have deep feelings of depression," a round-faced kid named Charlie Brown said to an imperious girl named Lucy in an early strip.

"What can I do about it?"

"Snap out if it," advised Lucy.

This was something new in the newspaper comic strip. At mid-century the comics were dominated by action and adventure, vaudeville and melodrama, slapstick and gags. Schulz dared to use his own quirks — a lifelong sense of alienation, insecurity, and inferiority — to draw the real feelings of his life and time. He brought a spare pen line, Jack Benny timing, and a subtle sense of humor to taboo themes such as faith, intolerance, depression, loneliness, cruelty, and despair. His characters were contemplative. They spoke with simplicity and force. They made smart observations about literature, art, classical music, theology, medicine, psychiatry, sports, and the law.

They explained America the way Huckleberry Finn does: Americans believe in friendship, in community, in fairness, but in the end, we are dominated by our apartness, our individual isolation — an isolation that went very deep, both in Schulz and in his characters.

A lifelong student of the American comic strip, Schulz knew the universal power of varying a few basic themes. He said things clearly. He distilled human emotion to its essence. In a few tiny lines — a circle, a dash, a loop, and two black spots — he could tell anyone in the world what a character was feeling. He was a master at portraying emotion, and took a simple approach to character development, assigning to each figure in the strip one or two memorable traits and problems, often highly comic, which he reprised whenever the character reappeared.

Charlie Brown was something new in comics: a real person, with a real psyche and real problems. The reader knew him, knew his fears, sympathized with his sense of inferiority and alienation. When Charlie Brown first confessed, "I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel," he was speaking for people everywhere in Eisenhower's America, especially for a generation of solemn, precociously cynical college students, who "inhabited a shadow area within the culture," the writer Frank Conroy recalled. They were the last generation to grow up, as Schulz had, without television, and they read Charlie Brown's utterances as existential statements — comic strip koans about the human condition.

For the first time in panel cartoons, characters spoke, as novelist and semiotics professor Umberto Eco noted, "in two different keys." The "Peanuts" characters conversed in plain language and at the same time questioned the meaning of life itself. "Peanuts" depicted genuine pain and loss but somehow, as the cartoonist Art Spiegelman observed, "still kept everything warm and fuzzy." By fusing adult ideas with a world of small children, Schulz reminded us that although childhood wounds remain fresh, we have the power as adults to heal ourselves with humor. If we can laugh at the daily struggles of a bunch of funny-looking kids and in their worries recognize the adults we've become, we can free ourselves. This alchemy was the magic in Schulz's work, the alloy that fused the Before and After elements of his own life, and it remains the singular achievement of his strip, the source of its universal power, without which "Peanuts" would have come and gone in a flash.

It's hard to remember now, when Snoopy and Charlie Brown dominate the blimps at golf tournaments instead of the comics in Sunday papers, that once upon a time Schulz's strip was the fault-line of a cultural earthquake. Garry Trudeau, creator of "Doonesbury," who came of age as a comic strip artist under Schulz's influence, thought of it as "the first Beat strip." Edgy, unpredictable, ahead of its time, "Peanuts" "vibrated with '50s alienation," Trudeau recalled. "Everything about it was different."

The "Peanuts" gang was appealing but also strange. Were they children or adults? Or some kind of hybrid? In their early years, the characters were volatile, combustible. They were angry. "How I hate him!" was the very first punch line in 'Peanuts.' Charlie Brown and his friends could be, as the cartoonist Al Capp said, "mean little bastards, eager to hurt each other." In "Peanuts," there was always the chance that the rage of one character would suddenly bowl over another, literally spinning the victim backward and out of frame. Coming home to relax, Charlie Brown sits down to a radio broadcast whose suave announcer is saying, "And what, in all this world, is more delightful than the gay wonderful laughter of little children?" Charlie Brown stands, sets his jaw, and kicks the radio set clear out of the room. Here was a comic strip hero, who, unlike his predecessors L'il Abner, Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka, or Beetle Bailey, could take the restrained fury of the fifties and translate it into a harbinger of sixties activism.

On the one hand, the action in "Peanuts" conveyed a very American sense that things could be changed, or at least modified, by sudden violence. By getting good and mad you could resolve things. But, at the same time, Charlie Brown reminded people, as no other cartoon character had, of what it was to be vulnerable, to be human.

He was even, for a time in the 1950s, called the "youngest existentialist," a term that literally sent his determinedly unsophisticated creator to the dictionary.

The experience of being an Everyman, a decent, caring person in a hostile world was essential to Charlie Brown's character, as it was to Charles Schulz's. We recognized ourselves in him — in his doomed ballgames, his deep awareness of death, his stoicism in the face of life's disasters — because he was willing to admit that just to keep on being Charlie Brown was an exhausting and painful process. "You don't know what it's like to be a barber's son," Charlie Brown tells Schroeder. He remembers how it felt to see tears running down his father's cheeks when his dad read letters in the newspaper attacking barbers for raising the price of a haircut. He recalls how hard his father worked to give his family a respectable life. By the fourth panel, Charlie Brown is so upset by his memories that he grabs Schroeder's shirt with both hands and screams, "YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE!!"

SCHULZ DID. A SHY, TIMID BOY, a barber's son, born on November 26, 1922, "Sparky" Schulz — nicknamed for the horse in "Barney Google"— had grown up from modest beginnings in St Paul, Minnesota, to realize his earliest dream of creating a newspaper comic strip. The only child of devoted parents, neither of whom had gone further in school than the third grade, Schulz linked the happy un-sophistication of his childhood home with the ideal of a dignified, ordinary life that he forever after tried to return to. "There are times," he wrote at 58, "when I would like to go back to the years with my mother and father. It would be great to be able to go into the house where my mother was in the kitchen and my comic books were in the other room, and I could lie down on the couch and read the comics and then have dinner with my parents."

But growing up was a dismaying process for Schulz. He felt chronically unsupported. "He always felt that no one really loved him," a relative recalled. "He knew his mom and dad loved him but he wasn't too sure other people loved him."

His intelligence revealed itself at St. Paul's Richard Gordon Elementary School, where he was singled out in the second grade as the outstanding boy student and did well enough in the third and fifth grades to be twice skipped ahead by half-grades. By the time he reached junior high school, he was the youngest, smallest boy in the class. He felt lost, unsure of himself. With no one to turn to, he made loneliness, insecurity, and a stoic acceptance of life's defeats his earliest personal themes. At the same time, he possessed a strong independent streak and grew increasingly stubborn and competitive as life and its injustices, real and imagined, piled up.

As a slight, 136-pound teenager, with pimples, big ears, and a face he thought of as so bland it amounted to invisibility, he had few friends at school. In practically every thing he did at St. Paul Central High, he felt underestimated by teachers, coaches, and peers. No one ever gave him credit for his drawing, or for playing a superior game of golf. "It took me a long time to become a human being," he once said. "I never regarded myself as being much and I never regarded myself as being good looking and I never had a date in high school, because I thought, who'd want to date me?"

Sensitive to slights, he never forgot the rejections of Central High. To the end of his life he remained baffled that the editors of the "Cehisean," the Central High yearbook, had rejected a batch of his drawings. At the age of 53, he made sure that a high school report card was printed in facsimile in a collection of his work "to show my own children that I was not as dumb as everyone has said I was." He sustained the traumas of his adolescence far into adulthood — far enough, in the end, to see them become a crucial element in the universal popularity of his art.

Chronic rejection and unrequited love are the twin plinths of Schulz's early life and later work. Even when he had become the one cartoonist known and loved by people around the world, he could still say, with conviction, "My whole life has been one of rejection."

As a young man he suffered deep loss. His mother's wrenching early death from colon cancer shaped the rest of his life. He was twenty when she died in February 1943 at the age of 48. Three days later, a private in the army, he boarded a train for Camp Campbell, Kentucky, and the war in Europe. The sense of shock and separation never left him. He survived World War II, as he had survived the Depression and the alienation of his youth, but the only world that had ever mattered to him — the secure home his parents had vouchsafed him — was gone, and for a time he had no hope for the future. His mother's death came to stand not only for her removal from his life, which would have been a cataclysm by itself, but also, because of the war, for Schulz's total separation from childhood and home. He would refer to it as a "loss from which I sometimes believe I never recovered."

Melancholy would dog him all his life, as would feelings of worthlessness, panic, high anxiety, and frustration. It wouldn't matter that he married twice, raised five children, and became the most widely syndicated and beloved cartoonist of all time, attaining success on a scale no individual comic strip artist had ever known. Success fell off him. He was unable to take refuge in its rewards. With his first wife and five children, he moved in 1958 to a paradise among the redwoods of Northern California, where he briefly found happiness during a decade in which the work of his pen and the peaks of his professional achievements coincided with the nation's upheavals. But Schulz knew better than anyone that he could never really become a sunny citizen of the Golden State. He found little comfort in fame or prosperity or the California sun. Pain gave him his core. "I think that one of the things that afforded Sparky his greatness," a friend would say after his death, "was his unwillingness to turn his back on the pain."

The private, quiet, depressed, Scandinavian part of Schulz's character was both the quality that made him completely different from any other comic strip artist and the trait that led him to struggle with himself and his creation like the tormented artist in a Henry James novel.

UNTIL 1965, SCHULZ PROVIDED unconventional commentary in the national margins. He set out consciously never to settle issues raised by the strip and never to bring in issues from outside. He never made overt political statements through "Peanuts." He remained apart from specific social and political causes, never joining the battle of ideas. Having established an idiom and a mode that commented on modern ills such as commercialization, real estate development, generational distrust, Schulz extended the area of doubt in modern life only insofar as he made it funny to doubt. But, as the sixties intensified, as the Vietnam War failed and nothing quite worked out, as the triumphal quality of American life modulated, "Peanuts" became a refuge. Schulz became the patron saint of people who were putting up with all they could take. Reading the strip was a peculiar mixture of utter forgetfulness and at the same time, tremendous consciousness. "Peanuts" was proof that you were not alone when you woke in the middle of the night marooned with your failures, staring into the dark, worrying that the world had gone mad.

From 1965 onward, the strip skyrocketed. When Schulz's "bunch of funny-looking kids" appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in April, "Peanuts" was embraced as the embodiment of the fundamental wisdom of the day. The strip and its characters had gone from being a campus phenomenon in the late 1950s to a mainstream cultural powerhouse. Throughout the '60s and early '70s, the visual and verbal vocabulary of the strip was one of the only languages that kept both the younger and older generation fluent with each other. Schulz's phrase "security blanket," and his ideas about that most American of concepts, happiness, found their way into "Webster's Dictionary" and "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations." The names and subversive attributes of his characters filtered into the counterculture of the '60s; the Grateful Dead's defiantly grubby organist, Ron McKernan, was nicknamed Pig Pen; another San Francisco rock band that formed in 1966 called itself Sopwith Camel. As American soldiers stenciled Snoopy onto their helmets and the Apollo 10 astronauts christened their command module Charlie Brown and their lunar landing vehicle Snoopy, Schulz left his imprimatur on the Cold War's highest and lowest moments — the race to put a man on the moon and the war in Vietnam.

In 1969, as the nation teetered, Schulz soared to previously unknown heights of popular culture. One snowy night that December, when Schulz was 47 years old, some 55 million viewers, more than half the nation's television audience, tuned in to the fourth airing of the Emmy-award-winning animated television special, "A Charlie Brown Christmas," the popularity of which confounded network executives who had predicted that its cartoon format, melancholy jazz score by Vincent Guaraldi, and simple retelling of the Nativity story from the Gospel of Luke would alienate the public. That same night, a musical, "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown," was playing to sold-out houses in its second season on Broadway; and a feature-length animated film, "A Boy Named Charlie Brown," was setting attendance records at Radio City Music Hall; every few hours, 6,000 more parents and children would form a vast line outside the "showplace of the nation." More than 150 million readers were following the daily and Sunday "Peanuts" strips, while in bookstores 'Peanuts' collections swamped the bestseller lists, eventually selling more than 300 million copies in 26 languages.

Long-suffering Charlie Brown, exuberant Snoopy, philosophical Linus, domineering Lucy, talented Schroeder, narcoleptic Peppermint Patty became revered figures in Japan, beloved in England, France, Germany, Norway, Italy, and known by sight in 75 countries throughout Europe, South America, Africa, Australia, and Asia. The "Times of London" called them "international icons of good faith" — perhaps not surprising for a cartoonist with a Dickensian gift for characterization. At all levels of society "Peanuts" had a profound and lasting influence on the way people saw themselves and the world in the second half of the 20th century.

Schulz's achievement was singular and planetary. An artist, a storyteller, he was now a worldwide industry, too. This had never happened to a newspaper cartoonist before. The new markets that "Peanuts" was dominating in stage, television, film, book, record, and subsidiary forms, simply hadn't been open to newspaper comic strip artists in 1950, when United Features Syndicate had given Schulz the chance to dream his dream. On that one night in 1969, he reached a larger, more diverse audience than any other single popular artist in American history. What was more, "Peanuts" was single-handedly expanding an industry that would revolutionize worldwide entertainment into the next century. In the late sixties, for the first time in the book trade, booksellers started to sell not just "Peanuts" books but also sweatshirts, dolls, and an increasing array of paraphernalia that bore the image and form of the characters in the books — an old idea called "licensing" that "Peanuts" products would turn into a global phenomenon, bringing in $1 billion a year to United Features and making Schulz richer than any popular artist in the world.

USING A CROW-QUILL PEN DIPPED in ink, Schulz drew every day through the next three decades. He always worked alone, without a team of assistants. For a self-doubting perfectionist — Schulz referred to himself as a fanatic — the strip cartoon was an ideal form: the cartoonist's relationship to the world is self-limiting. The strip cartoonist can get up, go to work, draw his daily panels, and go to bed at night feeling he's done his bit. At the same time, Schulz had a conflicted sense of duty. The unprecedented obligations of his new role as world-famous cartoonist kept him in a state of constant anxiety and dread. He loved to be asked to go places and do good things and receive prestigious honors, but he hated to leave home and routine. He felt he should meet people and see the world, but he was increasingly phobic about travel. He panicked on airplanes, broke out in a cold sweat at the very idea of a hotel lobby. At home in his studio, he loved receiving fan letters by the hundreds but resented the demands on his time. Perhaps because he refused so many requests for public appearances, he was unfailingly openhanded in his correspondence, answering scores of letters and special requests from strangers each day.

The condolences that flooded Schulz's office after news of his retirement from 'Peanuts' and then crested over into his household after his death are dominated by a single refrain: the handwritten response I received from Charles Schulz at a critical moment in my development changed forever the course of my life. He influenced two generations of comic strip artists, standup comedians, and readers everywhere. But unlike other seminal figures of American mass culture in the 1960s and '70s — Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Andy Warhol — Schulz had no itch to be a teacher, a guru, a manufacturer of lesser artists. "I don't know the meaning of life," he once said. "I don't know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it's a complete mystery."

He wanted only to exist in the extreme bottom right-hand corner of his own panels — where it said "Schulz." He wanted to limit himself to being that little scribble. If he could draw his four panels a day, sign himself "Schulz," close up shop and go home, all would be well.

Charles M. Schulz became the highest paid, most widely-read cartoonist ever. The only modern American comic strip artist to be given a retrospective at the Louvre, he was now in a class by himself. His characters cut a broad path across commerce and culture; Charlie Brown and Snoopy could go from being cartoon pitchmen for cars and life insurance, their huge heads and tiny bodies stretched across blimps at golf tournaments, to being the inspiration for a "Peanuts" concerto by contemporary composer Ellen Taafe Zwilich, premiering at Carnegie Hall. At the peak of Schulz's popularity, "Peanuts" captured 355 million readers, and he was earning from $30 to $40 million a year.

He kept on drawing as he always had. He often said, "My main job is to draw funny comic strips for the newspapers." He didn't set himself up as a chaplain or philosopher or therapist to the millions. He made no statements about important issues. He sat on no commissions. He went straight on with his work, even though the world begged him to change from being a commentator for a minor constituency in the 1950s to a national observer who had a great deal to say to the world at large. He wanted to be no different than anyone else.

As part of his morning routine, he ate an English muffin with grape jelly and drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup, then sat down to his drawing table and the long, white Strathmore board with the five-inch by five-inch panels in which he drew the daily strip. "He attempted to be ordinary," recalls Clark Gesner, author of the musical "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown." He wanted to be what he thought he had always been — a regular person.

In later life, Schulz joked that he looked like a druggist. Genial, smiling, with straight white teeth and a head of silver hair, he dressed modestly in muted slacks and pastel golf sweaters. He stood a trim five feet eleven and a half inches ("I never quite got to six feet") and liked to sprawl after work in a big blue leather easy chair, his long legs pointing straight at the TV set. "People say 'Where do you get your ideas?'" he once recalled, "because they look at me and they think, Surely this man could never think of anything funny." But smiling silver-haired druggists know the town pretty well. They have the common touch, they dispense daily doses of medicine to the melancholy people of Mudville, and they are the last to have illusions about what's really happening in people's lives.

He dreaded becoming a prisoner of success, perhaps because it meant he would lose control. "I don't want to attract attention," he said in 1981. "I've always had the fear of being ostentatious of people thinking that these things have gone to my head." He didn't have any experience being a millionaire or a celebrity. He wanted to be free. When reporters came around asking questions about his success, he would reply, "Have I had enormous success? Do you think so?" He hated to talk about it. In 1967, he hotly told a writer, "Life magazine said I was a multimillionaire — heck, no cartoonist can become a millionaire."

Into the 1980s and 1990s, his fortune mushroomed. Forbes magazine regularly listed Schulz among the top-ten highest-paid entertainers in the United States, along with Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, and Michael Jackson. He took little interest in accumulating money, gave millions away to charities, insisting always that he was the same old Sparky Schulz. At his drawing table in his studio at One Snoopy Place in Santa Rosa, he drew with the same old pens, the same old nibs. He liked to say that he would stay at the desk until he wore a hole clean through it.

Schulz took professional pride in the achievements of the strip. But pride in one's work does not automatically override years of early disappointments to create pride in one's self, and Schulz struggled to the end of his life to believe that he himself was worthy of the respect and love his admirers showered on him. "It is amazing that they think that what I do was that good," he said on the "Today" show in 1999. His voice quavered and he seemed as if he might break down when he said: "I just did the best I could."

In November 1999, after a stroke put him into the hospital, doctors discovered that colon cancer had metastasized to his stomach. He had an operation to remove the cancer, and the doctors got most of it, but the stroke and the surgery robbed Schulz of the will to go on drawing. He couldn't see clearly, he couldn't read. He struggled to recall the words he needed. But all that might have been tolerable except that chemotherapy had begun to make him sick to his stomach, and the statistics for Stage-4 colon cancer gave him a 20 percent chance to live.

On December 14, 1999, at the age of 77, Schulz announced his retirement. "I never dreamed that this would happen to me," he said. "I always had the feeling that I would stay with the strip until I was in my early eighties, or something like that. But all of sudden it's gone. It's been taken away from me. I did not take it away," he emphasized. "This was taken away from me."

After nearly fifty years of drawing "Peanuts," the world-famous cartoonist put down his pen in January, his hand gone shaky, his vision blurred. Being a comic strip artist was all he had ever wanted. On February 12, 2000, a dark night of pouring rain in Santa Rosa, California, Schulz got into bed a little after nine o'clock. He pulled up the covers. At 9:45 p.m., just hours before the final "Peanuts" strip appeared in Sunday newspapers around the world, Charles Schulz died — his life entwined to the very end with his art. As soon as he ceased to be a cartoonist, he ceased to be.

---