The Last Sunday
On the evening of Saturday, February 12, 2000, a man lay dying in his bed in Santa Rosa, California — a small, quiet city in Sonoma County wine country, about an hour north of San Francisco, a place he had chosen decades earlier precisely because it was not New York, not Los Angeles, not anywhere that would force him to become someone other than who he was. He was seventy-seven years old. The colon cancer diagnosed after abdominal surgery the previous November had metastasized with terrifying speed, and the stroke that followed had robbed him of what he needed most: the ability to arrange words in the correct order, to match thought to line, to sit at his drawing board and do the one thing he had done every single day for nearly fifty years. His name was Charles Monroe Schulz, though almost no one called him that. To his family and friends he was Sparky — a nickname bestowed two days after his birth by an uncle who thought the infant resembled Spark Plug, the hapless racehorse from the Barney Google comic strip. To the rest of the world, he was the man who drew Peanuts.
Somewhere across the country, printing presses were already rolling with the Sunday comics sections that would hit doorsteps the next morning. Among them was his final original strip — a farewell letter, really, in which he wrote, "Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy . . . how can I ever forget them. . . ." He died in his sleep that night. The strip ran the next day. Newspaper editors who had pre-written retirement tributes scrambled in the early hours to insert an improbable addendum: the cartoonist had not merely retired. He was gone. Lynn Johnston, who drew For Better or for Worse and who had sat with him in the hospital in his final weeks, recalled something Schulz had told her: "You control all these characters and the lives they live. You decide when they get up in the morning, when they're going to fight with their friends, when they're going to lose the game. Isn't it amazing how you have no control over your real life?"
"I think, in a way, he did," Johnston said.
The synchronicity was too precise to be coincidence and too strange to be design. The man and the strip expired together. "The strip and he were one," said Patrick McDonnell, creator of Mutts. This was not metaphor. It was diagnostic fact. For 17,897 consecutive strips — daily and Sunday, without a single ghost artist, without a single week handed off to an assistant — Charles Schulz had written, penciled, inked, and lettered every panel that left his studio. He drew Peanuts with a trembling hand in the final years, the lines wobbling from a condition that made the simple act of inking a curve an exercise in controlled defiance. He drew it anyway. When he finally stopped, his body followed the pen.
By the Numbers
The Peanuts Empire
17,897Comic strips written, drawn, inked, and lettered by Schulz alone
49.5 yearsDuration of the strip's run (Oct. 2, 1950 – Feb. 13, 2000)
2,600Newspapers carrying Peanuts in 75 countries, 21 languages
355 millionEstimated daily readership at peak
$1.1BAnnual revenue from strips, merchandise, and endorsements at peak
$40MSchulz's estimated annual personal earnings, 1990–2000
$48MEstate earnings in 2016 alone, driven by The Peanuts Movie
The Barber's Son and the Sunday Funnies
The poetry of his life — and it was poetry, however much he would have winced at the word — began in a second-floor apartment at 919 Chicago Avenue South in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He arrived on November 26, 1922, the only child of Carl Fredrich Augustus Schulz, a German-heritage barber, and Dena Bertina Halverson, a Norwegian-American homemaker. Carl ran a modest shop called The Family Barbershop at the corner of Selby and Snelling Avenues in St. Paul, where the family relocated when Charles was small. He worked six days a week. Their life revolved around the shop. The boy grew up watching his father lather and shave strangers, a rhythm of small talk and careful attention to other people's surfaces that would, in ways neither of them could have predicted, become a career.
Father and son shared a Sunday morning ritual: reading the funnies. Carl spread the colored comic supplements across the kitchen table, and Sparky studied them the way a seminarian studies scripture — with devotion, with taxonomic precision, with the unshakable conviction that this was what he was born to do. He loved E. C. Segar's Thimble Theatre, which starred Popeye. He loved Percy Crosby's Skippy. He loved Mickey Mouse and Buck Rogers. When, at age eleven, the first comic books began appearing in the United States, he bought each new issue and filled drawing books with meticulous copies of every character he admired.
On his first day of kindergarten at Mattocks School, the teacher handed each child a sheet of white paper and big crayons and told them to draw anything they liked. Young Charles drew a snow scene, then added a palm tree in the background — an unlikely combination the teacher noted aloud, which stuck in his memory for the rest of his life, an early illustration of the way his creativity would always find humor in incongruity. The teacher paused at his desk, looked at the drawing, and said, "Someday, Charles, you're going to be an artist." She wasn't quite right. He would become something rarer: a cartoonist who made an art form out of saying less.
He skipped two half-grades in elementary school, a decision that accelerated his education and devastated his social life. Suddenly the youngest in every class, he became shy and isolated — a teenager whose primary relationships were with the comic strips he copied and the mongrel dog named Spike who ate pins and razor blades and who, years later, would be reborn as a beagle named Snoopy. In 1937, fifteen-year-old Sparky sketched Spike and mailed the drawing to Robert Ripley, whose Believe It or Not! panels had global circulation. Ripley published it. The picture was signed "Sparky." It was his first published drawing — and for a long time, it seemed as if it might be his only one. His senior yearbook rejected his caricatures. His high school classmates barely knew him.
It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips. But I think I was. My ambition from earliest memory was to produce a daily comic strip.
His mother — quiet, Norwegian, devoted — saw what he was and paid for it. With Carl's blessing, she enrolled Sparky in a correspondence course at the Federal School of Applied Cartooning in Minneapolis, a $170 investment in subscriptions that, for a barber's family during the tail end of the Depression, was not trivial. It was also not accidental that the encouragement came from her. The relationship between the boy and his mother was the subterranean river beneath everything he would later create, though the world he built — a world of children without parents, where adults appear only as disembodied legs and honking offscreen voices — would conceal the source even as it broadcast the feeling.
Three Days Between a Death and a Departure
Two monumental events happened within days of each other in February 1943, and neither would release its grip on him for the rest of his life.
His mother, Dena, died of cervical cancer at age fifty. Three days later, Sparky boarded a troop train for Camp Campbell, Kentucky, to begin his service in the United States Army. He was twenty years old. The shock of that sequence — the vigil, the funeral, the barracks — compressed into a few merciless days the two experiences that would define his emotional vocabulary: grief and loneliness. The army, he later said, "taught me all I needed to know about loneliness."
Assigned to Company B of the Eighth Armored Battalion, Twentieth Armored Infantry
Division, Schulz trained as a machine gunner and rose to the rank of staff sergeant. He spent much of his service time in Kentucky guarding trucks — a detail so bathetically unheroic that Charlie Brown himself might have invented it — but in February 1945 his unit shipped to Europe, where they helped lead the charge on Munich and participated in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. He received the Combat Infantryman Badge for fighting in active ground combat under hostile fire. He drew his everyday adventures in a pocket sketchbook throughout the war, the pen his constant companion even as the world burned.
The sense of shock and separation never left him. David Michaelis, whose biography
Schulz and Peanuts remains the most comprehensive account of the cartoonist's life, traced a direct line from the loss of Dena Schulz to the central emotional frequency of
Peanuts: a strip in which children navigate an adult world alone, without guidance, without comfort, armored only by their own resilience and the unsentimental kindness of their peers. The mother is nowhere. The mother is everywhere.
The Apprenticeship of an Ordinary Man
After his discharge on January 6, 1946, Schulz returned to St. Paul and moved into an apartment above his father's barbershop. He was twenty-three, motherless, a combat veteran with no college degree and a single published drawing to his name. He was also, by his own description, "a nothing" — the kind of assessment that, from almost anyone else, would sound like false modesty but from Schulz carried the weight of conviction. He had internalized failure so deeply that it became a kind of fuel.
He found work at Art Instruction, Inc. — the same correspondence school where he had studied — correcting homework submitted by students. There he fell under the influence of Frank Wing, a perfectionist instructor who was the first person to recognize the potential in the cartoons Schulz sketched in his spare moments. Wing encouraged him. Others at Art Instruction became characters in disguise: a colleague named Charlie Brown — a real person, a friend — lent his name to the round-headed boy who would become the most famous loser in American literature. Brown saw "so much of Charlie Brown in himself," according to Michaelis. The real Charlie Brown was, like the fictional one, someone you liked immediately and felt slightly sorry for — not because he was pitiful, but because he was honest about his own bewilderment.
Schulz sold his first cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post in 1948. Seventeen single-panel cartoons would eventually run there. He also launched a weekly feature called Li'l Folks in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a strip featuring prototypes of the characters who would define his life. A boy with a round head. A spotted dog. Children who spoke with the bruised wisdom of middle-aged men. Li'l Folks ran from 1947 to 1950. Schulz was paid $10 per panel — a sum that left him wanting more, both financially and creatively. He asked the Pioneer Press for better pay and for the strip to be moved out of the women's section. They said no to both. He quit.
This was the first important decision. Not the drawing — he had always drawn. The quitting. The willingness to walk away from something that was working, however modestly, because it wasn't working well enough. He took his best Li'l Folks strips and mailed them to United Feature Syndicate in New York.
They said yes.
They also said: the name has to change.
A Name He Hated, a Strip He Loved
The title Peanuts was imposed by the syndicate, which feared that Li'l Folks sounded too similar to Li'l Abner and an existing strip called Little Folks. The replacement was drawn from the "peanut gallery" on the Howdy Doody television show — a reference Schulz found demeaning and irrelevant. He loathed the name for the rest of his life. "It's the worst title ever thought of for a comic strip," he told interviewers with varying degrees of controlled fury across five decades. He never stopped resenting it.
The first Peanuts strip appeared on October 2, 1950, in seven midwestern newspapers. The inaugural four-panel strip featured a boy walking down a sidewalk while two other children, sitting on a curb, watch him pass. "Well! Here comes ol' Charlie Brown!" says one. "Good ol' Charlie Brown . . ." Then, after he's passed: "How I hate him!" It was a masterpiece of compression. In four panels, Schulz had established the central dynamic of the strip — and, in a sense, of his own psychology. The need to be liked. The certainty of not being liked. The way those two conditions coexist, unresolved, in the same person, on the same sidewalk, in the same life.
At the height of the American postwar celebration — an era when being unhappy was, as David Michaelis wrote, "an antisocial rather than a personal emotion" — Schulz dared to make a comic strip about depression. Not explicitly, of course. Explicitly, it was about children. A round-headed kid named Charlie Brown who could never kick the football because Lucy always pulled it away. A blanket-toting philosopher named Linus. A fussbudget named Lucy who ran a psychiatric booth for five cents. A beagle named Snoopy who dreamed of being a World War I flying ace. A Beethoven-obsessed pianist named Schroeder. No adults. No resolution. No lessons learned.
But implicitly — in the way the characters spoke, in the way they carried themselves, in the devastating precision of their casual cruelties — it was about the things Schulz told the BBC in 1977 he was really dealing with: "I'm always very much offended when someone asks me, 'Do I ever do satire on the social condition?' Well, I do it almost every day. And they say, 'Well, do you ever do political things?' I say, 'I do things which are more important than politics. I'm dealing with love and hate and mistrust and fear and insecurity.'"
Leo Tolstoy dealt with the major problems of the world. I'm only dealing with why we all have the feeling that people don't like us.
The Alchemy of Small Feelings
The strip worked because Schulz understood something that neither his editors nor his early readers could quite articulate: that the smallest feelings are the most universal ones. Not heartbreak but the dull ache of being picked last. Not tragedy but the quiet humiliation of having your kite eaten by a tree. Not existential crisis but the three-in-the-morning certainty that something is fundamentally wrong with you, followed by the six-in-the-morning recognition that you have to get up and try again anyway.
Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and semiotics professor — a man who spent his career analyzing signs and systems of meaning — saw it clearly. "Peanuts charms both sophisticated adults and children with equal intensity," Eco wrote, "as if each reader found there something for himself, and it is always the same thing, to be enjoyed in two different keys." The strip operated in two registers simultaneously: as a gag comic for the eight-year-old and as an existential parable for the forty-year-old. Schulz achieved this not by being clever but by being honest. He put his own neuroses on the page — his insecurity, his loneliness, his fear of rejection, his conviction that he was somehow insufficient — and trusted that other people felt the same way. They did. By the hundreds of millions.
His wife Jeannie would later explain how the characters mapped onto their creator: "He used to say that he was a little bit of all of the characters. Charlie Brown is my wishy-washy and insecure side. Lucy is my smart-aleck side. Linus is my more curious and thoughtful side. Snoopy is the way I would like to be — fearless, the life of the party." This was not the standard artist's coy deflection. It was architecturally precise. Each character carried a single emotional frequency from Schulz's own interior life, amplified and isolated until it became a personality. Together, they formed a complete person — or at least, as complete a person as Schulz was willing to reveal.
Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist and playwright, identified what was genuinely new: "The Peanuts characters endure because they were the first real children in the comics pages, ones with doubts and anxieties." Before Schulz, comic strip children were punchlines or props. After Schulz, they were people. Small, round-headed, philosophically burdened people who spoke in sentences that could have come from Kierkegaard, delivered with the timing of Jack Benny.
Citizen Kane Forty Times
Here is a fact that does not belong in the biography of the man who drew Peanuts, which is precisely why it matters: Charles Schulz watched Citizen Kane forty times.
David Van Taylor, who directed the American Masters documentary on Schulz, stumbled upon this detail early in his research and recognized it as the key that unlocked everything. "You don't expect it," Van Taylor said. "You wouldn't expect it of the guy who drew Peanuts, and so it gets you started thinking." What was Schulz seeing in Orson Welles's masterpiece? The obvious answer — a portrait of a man who achieves everything and loses everything, whose empire of things cannot replace the one thing he truly loved — is also the uncomfortable one. Citizen Kane is about the hollowness at the center of American success. Schulz built one of the most commercially successful creative properties in human history. He earned $30 million a year in the 1980s — making him, by some measures, the highest-paid celebrity in the world. By the 1990s, that figure had risen to $40 million annually. Peanuts merchandise and endorsements generated $1.1 billion a year. He was a millionaire many times over, living in a large house in Santa Rosa with an ice arena he had built because he loved hockey.
And he was, by every credible account, deeply unhappy.
Not performatively unhappy, not artistically unhappy in the way that sells books and generates profile pieces. Unhappy in the way that Charlie Brown is unhappy — constitutionally, structurally, in the bones. He told his first wife, Joyce Halverson, during their honeymoon that he would never be truly happy. She built him an ice rink. He still couldn't be as affectionate as she wanted. His biographer documented a melancholy so persistent that it colored every relationship, every triumph, every day at the drawing board. "He was a man who was never able to be happy," Michaelis observed — a sentence that sounds reductive until you realize it describes both Schulz and Charlie Brown with equal accuracy.
The strip was the only place where the unhappiness became useful. Transformed into four panels and a punchline, his depression became comedy. His isolation became universality. His inability to accept love became a round-headed kid standing alone on a pitcher's mound, losing another game, saying "Good grief" with a weariness that 355 million people recognized as their own.
The Discipline of Ink
His daily routine was monastic. He woke early, drove to his studio at One Snoopy Place in Santa Rosa, sat at his drawing board, and drew. He preferred to put ink directly to paper — no preliminary pencil sketches, or at least very few. This was not recklessness. It was the discipline of a man who had spent decades refining his line until it could do more with less. The early strips, from the 1950s, feature rich detail, tricky perspective shots, elaborate backgrounds. By the mid-1960s, he had stripped everything away. A few lines became a house. A horizontal bar became a wall. Two dots and a curved line became a face carrying the full weight of human disappointment.
"One of the hardest things for a beginner to do is merely to get started on his first set of comic strips," Schulz wrote in an essay for Art Instruction, Inc. "It is strange that most people who have ambitions in the cartoon field are not willing to put in the great amount of work that many other people do in comparable fields. Most people who have comic-strip ambition wish to be able to draw only two or three weeks' material and then have it marketed. They are not willing to go through many years of apprenticeship."
This was autobiography disguised as advice. Schulz had spent years in apprenticeship — correcting students' homework, selling single-panel gags to the Saturday Evening Post for small sums, drawing Li'l Folks for $10 a week — before Peanuts existed. And even after the strip made him rich and famous, he continued to treat the work as apprenticeship. He never hired assistants. He never used ghost writers. He never took a vacation from the strip, except once, for his seventieth birthday, and even then he had worked ahead so that new strips would appear while he was away.
The art critic who reviewed his collected prose writings for Booklist noted that Schulz "wrote without drawing as limpidly as he did with. His sentences are as chaste and precise in diction, as direct in address, and as lucid in meaning as the words he put in the Peanuts gang's speech and thought balloons. His stylistic peers are Hemingway and the best of the lean, clean, mostly crime-fiction writers who followed Papa." This was not an overstatement. Schulz composed in sentences the way he drew in lines — by removing everything that wasn't essential until only the truth remained.
For a prophet of self-doubt, he formulated and drew his strips with remarkable decisiveness. The paradox was constitutive: a man who doubted everything about himself except his ability to draw. The work was the one thing that never wavered. Everything else — marriages, friendships, his sense of his own worth — fluctuated wildly. But the strip appeared every day, in every newspaper, in every language, without fail, for 17,897 consecutive installments. Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, called it "arguably the longest story ever told by one human being" — longer than any epic poem, any Tolstoy novel, any Wagner opera.
The Little Red-Haired Girl and Other Ghosts
Schulz used the strip as a confessional — not openly, never obviously, but in the way a novelist uses fiction: to tell the truth by rearranging it. The connections between his life and his work were so numerous and so precise that his biographer spent years untangling them.
When Schulz was a young instructor at Art Instruction, Inc., he fell in love with a red-haired woman named Donna Mae Johnson. He proposed. She turned him down and married another man. In the strip, Charlie Brown pined endlessly for a "Little Red-Haired Girl" who never appeared, never spoke, never acknowledged his existence — the most famous absent character in American popular culture. The real Donna Mae eventually saw the strips and recognized herself. The Charles M. Schulz Museum would later display the original drawings and gifts Schulz had given her, artifacts of a heartbreak that became a permanent feature of the funny pages.
His first marriage, to Joyce Halverson, produced five children and ended in divorce. During the dissolution, strips appeared that, to those who knew the family, read as coded dispatches from a domestic battlefield. Biographer Michaelis discovered that a Thanksgiving special mirrored details from the breakup. A strip featuring Snoopy swooning over a girl beagle at Daisy Hill Puppy Farm appeared the same day Schulz sent a postcard to Tracey Claudius, a twenty-five-year-old woman he had met at his ice arena while still married. He was forty-eight. He proposed to her twice. She rejected him both times.
The letters Schulz wrote to Claudius during their eight-month relationship — forty-four letters, thirty-five drawings, sold by Sotheby's in 2012 for an estimated $250,000 to $350,000 — revealed a man expressing himself with the innocent intensity of his own creation. "On April 22 you squeezed my hand in the dark, remember?" read one, on blue construction paper. Another showed Charlie Brown saying, "You don't miss me," with a forlorn look; in the next drawing, a big grin: "or do you?" Among the letters was a two-page original manuscript of Snoopy's novel, beginning with the immortal "It was a dark and stormy night," accompanied by a cover note: "Who else do you know that gets a manuscript from a dog?"
Selby Kiffer, Sotheby's international senior specialist in manuscripts, observed the paradox: "There's a bittersweetness to it and an innocence about it. He talks about squeezing her hand in the dark and stealing a kiss in a bookstore, the sort of thing that really you would associate more with Charlie Brown and his fantasies about the little red-haired girl than necessarily with a 48-year-old man." One of the books Schulz mentioned repeatedly in the letters was The Great Gatsby. Kiffer saw the resonance immediately: "Here you had this tremendously successful man who created this cultural phenomenon, and yet like Gatsby, he was searching for something."
The Courage of a Quiet Man
In April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Schulz was at the height of his influence — Peanuts was the most widely read comic strip in the world, a cultural institution that appeared in thousands of newspapers across dozens of countries. A Los Angeles schoolteacher named Harriet Glickman wrote him a letter.
Glickman — a suburban housewife, mother of three, and, in her own words, "a deeply concerned and active citizen" — asked a simple question: would Schulz consider introducing a Black child into the Peanuts cast? "I believe that it will be another generation before the kind of open friendship, trust and mobility will be an accepted part of our lives," she wrote. She appealed to the strip's gentleness, its normalcy, its power to shape "the unconscious attitudes of our kids."
Schulz replied honestly. He feared that the sudden appearance of a Black character would make him seem clumsy and patronizing. Glickman pressed him. She showed his letter to Black friends, who responded with encouragement. Schulz relented. On July 31, 1968, a boy named Franklin appeared in Peanuts for the first time, meeting Charlie Brown at the beach. There was no fanfare, no special announcement, no editorial apparatus. Franklin simply existed, the way children exist — naturally, without explanation. Editors in some Southern newspapers complained. Schulz did not care.
He later told interviewers that introducing Franklin was "the right thing to do." But the most revealing thing about the episode is how ordinary Schulz made it. He didn't write an "issues" strip. He didn't congratulate himself. He drew a boy at a beach and put him in the neighborhood. The radicalism was in the normalcy.
It was consistent with a philosophy he articulated in a letter discovered fifty years later by Joel Lipton, who had written to Schulz as a ten-year-old in 1970 asking what makes a good citizen. Schulz replied: "I think it is more difficult these days to define what makes a good citizen than it has ever been before. Certainly all any of us can do is follow our own conscience and retain faith in our democracy. Sometimes it is the very people who cry out the loudest in favor of getting back to what they call 'American Virtues' who lack this faith in our country. I believe that our greatest strength lies always in the protection of our smallest minorities."
A Charlie Brown Christmas and the Argument for Sincerity
In 1965, Lee Mendelson — a San Francisco documentary filmmaker who had tried and failed to sell a Peanuts documentary to the networks — received a phone call from Coca-Cola's advertising agency, McCann Erickson. Charlie Brown and the gang had just appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The agency wanted a Christmas special. Mendelson, desperate after his documentary had imploded, lied. He told the agent that he and Schulz had already discussed such a project. Then he called Schulz.
"Schulz said, 'What's that?'" Mendelson recalled. "And I said, 'It's something you're going to write tomorrow.'"
Mendelson brought in animator Bill Melendez, who had helped animate a two-minute segment for the never-aired documentary. The three met in Schulz's office in Sebastopol, California. Schulz wanted the show to focus on the childhood stress of putting on a Christmas play. Mendelson, who had just read Hans Christian Andersen's The Fir-Tree, suggested including a sad, misunderstood tree. They cranked out an outline and shipped it to Atlanta via Western Union.
The production was troubled from the start. A McCann executive — Mendelson was almost certain it was Neil Reagan, older brother of the future president — visited the studio mid-production, saw the black-and-white storyboards, and was visibly alarmed by the slow pacing. He told Mendelson he wouldn't report what he'd seen to the agency, because if he did, they would cancel the show. The team hired jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi, whose "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" struck the same balance of somber enlightenment and childlike buoyancy that Schulz achieved in the strip. But when they played the introduction as the children skated on a frozen pond, Mendelson realized the music was too slow and solemn. Something was missing. He improvised. The result was "Christmas Time Is Here," a song that has since become one of the most recognizable pieces of holiday music in the world.
Schulz insisted on one element that nearly killed the special: Linus reciting the King James Version of the nativity story from the Gospel of Luke. The network hated it. The agency hated it. Everyone told Schulz that religious content would alienate viewers. He did not budge. "If we don't do it, who will?" he asked. The scene stayed.
A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired on December 9, 1965. It won Emmy and Peabody awards. It has aired every December for more than fifty years — longer than any other holiday special except Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. President Obama called it "one of the country's most beloved traditions." The Vince Guaraldi soundtrack became one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. And the special succeeded for precisely the reason everyone thought it would fail: because it was sincere. No laugh track. Child voice actors who sounded like actual children, not professional performers. Jazz instead of orchestral bombast. A scraggly tree that was perfect because it was imperfect. A Bible verse read by a boy with a blanket. Schulz had bet the entire production on the radical proposition that sincerity was not a weakness. He was right.
The Empire of Nickel-and-Dime Feelings
The commercial machinery that built up around Peanuts was staggering in scale and somewhat bewildering in origin, given that its source was a man who fundamentally distrusted success. By the 1980s, Peanuts merchandise — stuffed animals, clothing, greeting cards, lunchboxes, MetLife insurance advertisements featuring Snoopy — generated hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Snoopy floated as a massive balloon in New York City's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade beginning in 1968 and appeared in nearly every parade thereafter. NASA named the command module and lunar module of its May 1969 Apollo 10 mission after Charlie Brown and Snoopy. The musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown premiered in 1967 and has been staged continuously ever since. The strip itself appeared in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries and 21 languages.
Schulz's relationship with this empire was complicated. He was not naive about money — his obituary in The New York Times noted that he had earned more than $1 billion between 1950 and 2000 from the sale of merchandise, television shows, and endorsements. He oversaw the licensing personally, maintaining a level of creative control unusual for a newspaper cartoonist. He believed that if the creator continued to produce the comic himself and supervised the ancillary products, the integrity of the work could be preserved. Most critics agreed that he was right, at least in his specific case. The strip never felt cheapened by the merchandise in the way that later franchises would.
But the money was also a trap. Schulz's friend and fellow cartoonist Bill Watterson — creator of Calvin and Hobbes, who famously refused all licensing offers and retired his strip after ten years — represented the road not taken. Watterson believed that licensing inherently corrupted the art. Schulz believed it didn't have to. The argument between these positions is unresolvable, and Schulz knew it. He drew Peanuts for fifty years. Watterson drew Calvin and Hobbes for ten. The difference in duration is not unrelated to the difference in philosophy.
What the money could not buy was contentment. When President Jimmy Carter met Schulz in the Oval Office in 1979, he stood up and announced that he was delighted to meet the creator of Peanuts. A reporter asked Schulz afterward, "D'you think the president likes the strip or just the name?" It was a joke, but it contained the essential Schulz question: Do they like me, or do they like what I've made? Charlie Brown would have asked the same thing, in the same tone, with the same unanswerable anxiety.
The Last Interview
When the cancer diagnosis came in the fall of 1999, the forecast was dire. Schulz announced his retirement on December 14, 1999. "I have always wanted to be a cartoonist and I feel very blessed to have been able to do what I love for almost 50 years," he said in an open letter. "That all of you have embraced Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus and all the other 'Peanuts' characters has been a constant motivation for me."
One thing was clear immediately: when Schulz stopped drawing Peanuts, that was it. No successor. No ghost artist. No continuation. The strip would end because its author ended. When he died, his will stipulated that no new Peanuts comic strips could be drawn by another cartoonist. His wishes have been honored.
There had been plans for a series of valedictory interviews and events, but the cancer advanced faster than anyone expected. A stroke followed. The effects lingered, making it difficult to collect his thoughts and put words in the correct order — a cruelty almost too pointed for fiction, that the man whose genius resided in the precision of words and lines should be robbed of both.
The Schulz family reached out to Al Roker personally. Roker — a vocal, lifelong Peanuts fan — had always been a favorite of the cartoonist. The family invited him to Santa Rosa for one last conversation. The man sitting across from Roker strained to be the affable, humble, witty presence he had been for decades, but the effort showed. Sometimes the words didn't come out or ended up in the wrong order. Two emotions were visible beneath the surface. One was deep sadness — about the end of Peanuts, about the end of his life, about the sobering weight of all those readers who had trusted him with their mornings for half a century. The other was something harder and more unexpected: anger. A righteous, quiet fury. Schulz was modest, but he was also a fighter. He had discovered that part of himself in the darkest days of his service in World War II, and he had never lost it.
"I never even let Charlie Brown kick the football," he blurted to Roker near the end.
There was an injustice to it. Not just to Charlie Brown — to himself. He had devoted every day of his life to this story, and now it was being snatched away like the football. Lucy's hand had reached in from somewhere he could not see.
Roker asked him, finally, what he wanted to say to his fans.
"I hope I've made you proud," he gasped, and then he broke down, weeping.
As the interview concluded, there was no sound but the soft tears of a man at his end, distraught that the line he had drawn for fifty years — the simplest line in the world, a circle for a head and two dots for eyes — had finally reached a place he could not follow.
I never even let Charlie Brown kick the football.
On the morning of Sunday, February 13, 2000, newspaper readers opened their comic pages to the final original Peanuts strip. In living rooms and kitchens and coffee shops across seventy-five countries, in twenty-one languages, they read a farewell they didn't yet know was a eulogy. The man who drew it had died in his sleep the night before, at home in Santa Rosa, in the quiet city he had chosen because it let him be who he was. His wife said, "He had done everything he wanted."
On the drawing board, nothing. The ink had dried.
