Before man went to the Moon, Snoopy did. In 1969, as Apollo 10 approached its destination, “Snoopy” – the lunar module – detached from the command module “Charlie Brown”. That wasn’t even Snoopy’s first time in orbit. The year before, Charles M Schulz, the cartoonist behind the Peanuts comic strip, had drawn his childhood beagle on the Moon, beating “the Americans, the Russians, and that stupid cat next door”.
In postwar America, Snoopy, his owner Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts empire had become, in the words of one critic, “less a brand than a US government seal of approval”. A dreamer with a rich inner life, Snoopy, sitting on top of his kennel, imagines himself as numerous different characters – endearing himself to the nation with his delusions. Sometimes he’s a budding novelist; other times he’s a world-famous hockey player, John McEnroe or a Flying Ace.
US soldiers in Vietnam clung to this last identity, pasting Snoopy’s image on uniforms, guns and planes. However, Schulz, who had himself been drafted into the Second World War, had complex feelings about the war in South-East Asia. “Is your whole family here at the beach?” Charlie Brown asks Franklin – introduced in 1968 after a high-school teacher wrote to Schulz urging him to create a black character in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination. “No, my dad is over in Vietnam,” Franklin replies. “My dad’s a barber,” Charlie Brown tells his new friend. “He was in a war too, but I don’t know which one.” These children’s conversations became the voice of an anxious and uncertain America.
Peanuts was published in newspapers for the first time on 2 October 1950. By the mid-Sixties, it had tens of millions of daily readers, becoming the most widely read comic strip in the world, translated into more than 20 languages, reaching some 355 million readers in 75 countries. In Japan, Peanuts was taken so seriously that the official translator of the strip was also a Nobel Prize front-runner. Schulz was the first modern cartoonist to be given a retrospective in the Louvre.
The boom was partly driven by the rapid commercialisation of culture. The Peanuts gang are found around the world on just about anything, and Snoopy has now far outstripped his shy owner, Charlie Brown, in fame. A large amount of his appeal lies in the simplicity of his design, but what really embedded the comic in the American psyche was its power to express so gently the melancholy of everyday life: its rejection, failure, disillusionment. “I worry about school a lot,” says Charlie Brown, when his best friend Linus tells him he looks depressed, “I also worry about my worrying so much about school… my anxieties have anxieties.”
Peanuts is the story of a changing America, the voice of a silent generation, and, as the pop culture scholar Robert Thompson noted, “arguably the longest story told by a single artist in human history”.
Schulz worked on Peanuts for nearly 50 years, single-handedly writing, drawing and lettering 17,897 strips. His existence and Peanuts were so intrinsically linked that their endings were only a few hours apart. Schulz died of a heart attack on 12 February 2000. The next day, his last comic strip announcing his retirement appeared. “No, I think he’s writing…” Charlie Brown says down the phone to an unknown caller.
Charles “Sparky” Schulz, was born in St Paul, Minneapolis, in 1922 to Carl Schulz and a Norwegian mother, Dena Halverson. An only child, he was forever shadowed by loneliness. Their pet beagle Spike, who according to Schulz’s biographer David Michaelis “knew how to ring a doorbell”, would be a blueprint for Charlie Brown’s all-too-human dog. The name, derived from the Norwegian term of endearment snuppa, was a suggestion from Dena near the end of her life: “If we ever have another dog, I think we should name him Snoopy.”
Schulz credited the Midwest for a large part of his sensibility. For him, this was the real America. When dealing with businessmen from the east and west coasts, Schulz would sell as an advantage his “being a little naive” and coming from “a place as relatively calm as St Paul, Minnesota… where my interests were not too sophisticated and yet not too bland”.
Schulz’s obsession with being ordinary reached deep into his childhood; he was surprised that anyone could recognise a “bland, stupid-looking kid”. Invisibility seized him both outside and inside the home. When he was a teenager, his mother became ill, but the knowledge that it was cancer was hidden from him until near her death. “Adults seem to keep things hidden from you,” he later reflected, “things that they think you shouldn’t hear about, which is nonsense.”
Strikingly, there are no adults in Peanuts. Schulz had stopped drawing them years before when developing his style, but claimed this wasn’t intentionally philosophical: “I drew [kids] because that’s what sold.” There was an assumption that childhood was a joyous time. Schulz and Peanuts subverted this: “Even in this happy-ending nation, Schulz’s strip rarely ends happily,” wrote the Saturday Evening Post.
Charlie Brown never wins a baseball game and never manages to kick a football; his love for the Little Red-Haired Girl goes forever unrequited. Lucy offers psychiatric advice, which simply rehashes her own insecurities. Linus clings to a “security blanket”, a concept popularised by Schulz. Snoopy is a dreamer, but even in his dreams, he doesn’t come out on top. His novel is never published, the Red Baron – the fantasy nemesis to his Flying Ace persona – wins every battle. For Schulz, the adult world and childhood carried the same weight, the same sadness, the same anger. “Anybody who says Peanuts is cute is just crazy,” Schulz once said. “It’s not cute. There are a lot of bitter and sarcastic things in [it].”
Before the advent of television, comic strips were one of America’s primary forms of entertainment. Schulz resisted a Peanuts TV adaptation for ten years, concerned about maintaining its artistic integrity. He once walked out of a meeting when someone suggested a laugh track. Ultimately, he embraced the medium, and the Peanuts gang was brought to screens in 1965 in A Charlie Brown Christmas. On screen, Snoopy lost his thought bubbles. Schulz was adamant that he must not speak: “He barks, he thinks, but he doesn’t speak English.” With the audience cut off from his witty, philosophical musings, Snoopy leaned into slapstick, his joy and sadness heightened and the line between delusion and reality blurred.
Many have tried to put words in Snoopy’s mouth. In October 2024, a fan account posted an AI-generated Snoopy shaking Donald Trump’s hand, calling for “a secure border, and a government that prioritises prosperity for its tax-paying citizens rather than illegal immigrants”. There was an immediate backlash, as fans protested that this isn’t what the dog would stand for (“Snoopy would hate ur ass,” read one post).
But Snoopy would never really have dipped his paws in something so fraught. “He has to retreat into his fanciful world in order to survive,” Schulz explained. It’s Charlie Brown who lies awake at night worrying, “Why isn’t the world perfect?” For those coming of age in America during the staid Eisenhower years, he embodied quiet despair and hidden disappointment.
Ours is more an age of doubt and inarticulacy, and today’s young might find comfort in the whimsical dog, who is the only real child in the comic, escaping from the anguish of reality through his dreams. Distilled into memes, Snoopy’s wordless form is perfect for a generation who feel more comfortable expressing themselves with emojis rather than words. If Snoopy had his thought bubbles removed, so, perhaps, have we.
[Further reading: The manosphere’s literary muscle men]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate