Charles Schulz Biography

Schulz was the brilliant creator of Peanuts, a group of contemplative children – Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Woodstock, Lucy and Linus & co – who speak about alienation, insecurity and inferiority with humour and empathy.

Peanuts is about the human condition, its characters speak with simplicity and force, making smart observations about literature, art, theology, psychiatry and the law.

In the post-war American delusion of unity, Schulz’s characters were friends bound together by their isolation. It was a state that Schulz understood profoundly.

Schulz was the only child of devoted and uneducated parents; later, as a cartoonist, Schulz was to revel in those uncomplicated memories. As an unusually smart kid, he felt lost, insecure and had few friends.

At the age of 20, his mother died and, three days later, he was sent to war in Europe. He survived, but never recovered from the shock; melancholy dogged him for the rest of his life and he was unable to ever acknowledge his success.

In 1947, Schulz' first break came, when he sold a cartoon feature to the St Paul Pioneer Press; in the next year two years he sold 15 more strips. Filled with determination, Schulz took his drawings to New York for a meeting with United Feature Syndicate, and, in October that same year, Peanuts debuted in seven papers.

With animator Bill Melendez, Schulz started to draw animated films starring Charlie Brown, for which he won many awards. Schultz became the most widely syndicated cartoonist in history, and published more than 1400 books.

Following the success of Peanuts, Schulz attempted to branch out with a sports-related strip called It's Only A Game. However, the pressure of continuing Peanuts meant that the cartoon was short-lived.

He did, however, continue a strip called Young Pillars, which was printed in religious magazine Youth.

Schulz's drawing style is heavily influenced by Milton Caniff, who created Terry and the Pirates, and Bill Mauldin, while others have noticed similarities in Krazy Kat, Thimble Theater and Skippy.

During the 50-year production of Peanuts, Schulz took only one holiday of five weeks in 1997. However, he had to reduce his workload after developing Parkinson's disease and retired the strip in 1999.

Schulz died from colon cancer on 12 February 2000, the day before the last ever original Peanuts strip was published.

It is estimated that the cartoonist earned $1.1 billion dollars in his lifetime and is still taking in money. In 2009, Forbes ranked Schulz as the sixth highest-earning deceased celebrity, having earned $35 million in 2008.