In Charles Schulz's The Complete Peanuts 1969-1970, Woodstock makes his first appearance, Peppermint Patty runs afoul of her school's dress code, Lucy declares herself a "New Feminist," and Snoopy returns to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm on a speaking engagement. Speaking of Snoopy, this volume falls under the sign of the Great Beagle, as three separate storylines focus on the mysterious sovereign of Beagledom. Lucy throws Schroeder's piano into the maw of the kite-eating tree, with gruesome results... Miss Othmar goes on strike and Linus gets involved... Charlie Brown's baseball team has an actual (brief) winning streak... Snoopy's quest to compete in the Oakland ice skating competition is thwarted by his inability to find a partner... Charlie Brown goes to a banquet to meet his hapless baseball hero Joe Shlabotnik... Snoopy is left in the Van Pelt family's care as the Browns vacation... and the Little Red-Haired Girl moves away.
Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922 in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google).
In his senior year in high school, his mother noticed an ad in a local newspaper for a correspondence school, Federal Schools (later called Art Instruction Schools). Schulz passed the talent test, completed the course and began trying, unsuccessfully, to sell gag cartoons to magazines. (His first published drawing was of his dog, Spike, and appeared in a 1937 Ripley's Believe It Or Not! installment.) Between 1948 and 1950, he succeeded in selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post--as well as, to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press, a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks. It was run in the women's section and paid $10 a week. After writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit.
He started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates. In the spring of 1950, he received a letter from the United Feature Syndicate, announcing their interest in his submission, Li'l Folks. Schulz boarded a train in June for New York City; more interested in doing a strip than a panel, he also brought along the first installments of what would become Peanuts--and that was what sold. (The title, which Schulz loathed to his dying day, was imposed by the syndicate). The first Peanuts daily appeared October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952.
Diagnosed with cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day--and the day before his last strip was published--having completed 17,897 daily and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and lettered entirely by his own hand--an unmatched achievement in comics.
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