Charles Schulz

Charles Monroe Schulz — known to friends as "Sparky" — was born on November 26, 1922, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Saint Paul, where he first cultivated his passion for drawing. After being drafted in 1943 and serving in the U.S. Army during the closing years of World War II, he returned to Minnesota and launched his professional cartooning career with the strip Li'l Folks in 1947.

Three years later, Schulz reworked that material into a four-panel format and pitched it to United Features Syndicate, which published the retitled Peanuts beginning in October 1950. The strip's quietly melancholic cast — anchored by the perpetually beleaguered Charlie Brown and the irrepressible beagle Snoopy — would run uninterrupted for fifty years, with Schulz serving as sole artist, writer, letterer, and inker throughout. In 1958 he relocated to Northern California, and from 1965 onward he contributed to a series of animated television specials and four theatrical films, beginning with A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Schulz continued drawing the strip until his death on February 12, 2000. His influence on subsequent generations of cartoonists — among them Bill Watterson, Matt Groening, Jim Davis, and Dav Pilkey — is widely acknowledged. He was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1996, and was posthumously honored by the United States Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2007.