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PEANUTS

Childhood Seriousness

The comic strip Peanuts, written and drawn by Charles Schulz, was immensely popular in the 1950s. First syndicated in eight newspapers in 1950, the comic strip Peanuts was the most successful strip of the decade. By the end of the 1950s the strip appeared in more than four hundred newspapers in the United States and in thirty-five foreign papers. The strip was notable in that its characters, all children, acted and talked through their childhood activities with all the seriousness and insecurities of adults. As the Saturday Evening Post commented in 1957, readers of the comic strip imagined Schulz as a "superintellectual."

Mistaken Intellectual

In 1956 a staffer for Adlai Stevenson telephoned Schulz to ask him to support her candidate. During their conversation she called Schulz, on the basis of his comic strip Peanuts, "the youngest existentialist." Schulz politely declined to endorse Stevenson but did have one question: "What is an existentialist?"

Early Years

Schulz began his career as a cartoonist in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1949 drawing cartoons that were published once a week in a Saint Paul newspaper. He began selling cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post in 1950. Later that year he sent eight of the cartoons published in the Post and a selection of his Saint Paul publications to the United Features Syndicate. In October Peanuts premiered in eight newspapers. The strip steadily grew in popularity. A Sunday strip was added, and Schulz began to publish book collections of his strips.

Wide Success

In 1958 Schulz was making ninety thousand dollars per year from his cartoons and books, and newspaper circulation of Peanuts was continuing to rise. Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, Linus, Schroeder, Peppermint Patty, Sally, and the rest of the Peanuts cast became a stock part of American popular culture. The Coasters' 1959 song "Charlie Brown" exemplifies the cultural role the comic strip had come to play, as the reference to it was indirect but unmistakable. Peanuts continued to grow in readership as one of the most popular of postwar comic strips.