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 All About Art
Charles Schulz
published: November 2006
By Tamar Burris, Contributing Writer
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Charles M. Schulz was the kind and gentle artist who brought us Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang. Born on November 26, 1922, Schulz always knew he wanted to be a cartoonist. In fact, one of his important weekly rituals as a child was to read the comics with his father every Sunday. In 1937, when he was just a teenager, a newspaper published Schulz drawing of the family dog, giving him his first taste of fame.
Putting his career on hold to enlist in the military, Schulz drew many sketches of army life while serving as a machine-gun squad leader during World War II. He returned to his home of St. Paul, Minnesota, after the war. There he drew for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and sold several drawings to The Saturday Evening Post. But it was on October 2, 1950when his comic strip Peanuts debuted in seven different newspapersthat Schulz realized his dream of being a full-fledged cartoonist. In the nearly 50 years that followed, the talented Schulz was twice given the Reuben Award by the National Cartoonists Society for his work and Peanuts was translated into more than 20 languages and published in more than 2,600 different newspapers worldwide.
In December 1999, Schulz announced his retirement for health reasons. Peanuts had become the worlds most widely read comic strip, and Schulz was now regarded as one of the greatest cartoonists in history. At the time of Schulz death on February 12, 2000, Peanuts was being read by over 300 million people in 75 different countries.
Written by Tamar Burris, a former elementary school teacher who now works as a freelance writer and curriculum developer for PBS, the Discovery Channel and other education-related companies. Sources: Charles M. Schulz Museum, http://www.schulzmuseum.org/ ; Farewell to Schulz, Peanuts, San Francisco Chronicle, February 14, 2000, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/02/14/MNE87245.DTL.
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