Today, Snoopy can be found on coffee mugs, greeting cards and blimps, and even has his own amusement park. But Charlie Brown's lovable black and white spotted dog wasn't always mainstream. In fact, when the comic strip first appeared in the 1950s, the dog and his Peanut friends were considered, to quote Time Magazine's David Michaels, “the fault-line of a cultural earthquake” due to the way the comic depicted life, real characters, and sadness. Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, went so far as to call Peanuts “the first Beat strip… everything about it was different…. [it] vibrated with '50s alienation.”
The story of Peanuts is the story of its creator, Charles Schulz- the man who changed everything about comic strips.
Schulz was born on November 16, 1922. He would later state that a mere two days after his birth, “an uncle came in and looked at me and said, ‘By golly, we're going to call him Sparkplug.' So, I've been called Sparky since the day after I was born…”
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