The Charlie Brown Dictionary

by Charles M. Schulz, Wendell W. Wright

Twenty-four hundred terms and grammatical forms most often heard or read by children are explained via cartoons

Genres: Reference, Childrens, Nonfiction

399 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Charles Monroe Schulz was an American cartoonist, whose comic strip Peanuts proved one of the most popular and influential in the history of the medium, and is still widely reprinted on a daily basis.
Schulz's first regular cartoons, Li'l Folks, were published from 1947 to 1950 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press; he first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to The Saturday Evening Post; the first of 17 single-panel cartoons by Schulz that would be published there. In 1948, Schulz tried to have Li'l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. Li'l Folks was dropped from the Pioneer Press in January, 1950.
Later that year, Schulz approached the United Feature Syndicate with his best strips from Li'l Folks, and Peanuts made its first appearance on October 2, 1950. The strip became one of the most popular comic strips of all time. He also had a short-lived sports-oriented comic strip called It's Only a Game (1957–1959), but he abandoned it due to the demands of the successful Peanuts. From 1956 to 1965 he contributed a single-panel strip ("Young Pillars") featuring teenagers to Youth, a publication associated with the Church of God.
Peanuts ran for nearly 50 years, almost without interruption; during the life of the strip, Schulz took only one vacation, a five-week break in late 1997. At its peak, Peanuts appeared in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. Schulz stated that his routine every morning consisted of eating a jelly donut and sitting down to write the day's strip. After coming up with an idea (which he said could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours), he began drawing it, which took about an hour for dailies and three hours for Sunday strips. He stubbornly refused to hire an inker or letterer, saying that "it would be equivalent to a golfer hiring a man to make his putts for him." In November 1999 Schulz suffered a stroke, and later it was discovered that he had colon cancer that had metastasized. Because of the chemotherapy and the fact he could not read or see clearly, he announced his retirement on December 14, 1999.
Schulz often touched on religious themes in his work, including the classic television cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), which features the character Linus van Pelt quoting the King James Version of the Bible Luke 2:8-14 to explain "what Christmas is all about." In personal interviews Schulz mentioned that Linus represented his spiritual side. Schulz, reared in the Lutheran faith, had been active in the Church of God as a young adult and then later taught Sunday school at a United Methodist Church. In the 1960s, Robert L. Short interpreted certain themes and conversations in Peanuts as being consistent with parts of Christian theology, and used them as illustrations during his lectures about the gospel, as he explained in his bestselling paperback book, The Gospel According to Peanuts, the first of several books he wrote on religion and Peanuts, and other popular culture items. From the late 1980s, however, Schulz described himself in interviews as a "secular humanist": “I do not go to church anymore... I guess you might say I've come around to secular humanism, an obligation I believe all humans have to others and the world we live in.”

Reviews

[Andrew Ives · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a children's dictionary, at 400 pages, this is quite a weighty tome. The illustrations are all in colour, sometimes large, sometimes small, sometimes rather sparse and sometimes not especially appropriate to the word they're defining, but they are pleasant and the whole Peanuts gang atmosphere to the book makes it appealing. As this was written in 1974, surpringly few definitions seem dated. Yes, there are vinyl records, floor waxing, Imperial measurements, but this doesn't seem very prevalent. Changes of society's attitudes to gender stereotyping are a little more noticeable, with 'wiping the dishes for Mummy' and 'wonder if Daddy can mend my toy train' types of examples here and there, although again, this isn't particularly pervasive. My UK edition is clearly a US book converted, with occasional peculiarly American turns of phrase, although all the spellings have been made British. Most definitions come with little educational extras too, explaining how things work or expanding on months, days, dates. I did find the apparently randomly inconsistent uses of bold font, margins/paragraphing, and why some verbs were explained rather more fully than other verbs, with their past tenses and plurals. The corners of the pages are colour coded, but T is blue and red. "Halloween" and "Hallowe'en" are both used in the same paragraph. Some of the colour definitions are printed in those colours, but they are a bit dubious, such as 'brown' which is not brown and 'black' which uses Franklin as an example(!). Snoopy rides a 'wave' where the sea is green. Careless slip-ups like this mar an otherwise very worthy book that children, almost 50yrs on, would still enjoy and learn from. 4.25/5