About the Author

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). His ambition from a young age was to be a cartoonist and his first success was selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post between 1948 and 1950. He also sold a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press. 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 and in the spring of 1950, United Feature Syndicate expressed interest in Li'l Folks. They bought the strip, renaming it Peanuts, a title Schulz always loathed. 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.

Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

Reviews

The publisher of the Complete Peanuts series scored a major publicity coup when it snagged President Obama to pen an introduction for the latest volume, but the book's genuine significance lies in the fact that it marks the conclusion of the landmark project reprinting the entire 50-year run of the much-loved newspaper strip. These last strips are marked by the increased prominence of the strip's newest cast member, Linus's and Lucy's younger brother, Rerun, who learns the ropes of baseball under the tutelage of "The Master," Charlie Brown, and takes up drawing underground comic books. Schulz's line had grown increasingly shaky in his final years, but while the casual assurance of earlier decades may be gone, the slightly wavering mien of the characters imparts a touching humanity to these twilight installments. All two-and-a-half-years of Peanuts' precursor, Schulz's late-1940s weekly gag feature, Li'l Folks, rounds out the volume, bringing Schulz's cartooning career full circle.--Gordon Flagg "Booklist"