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.

Whoopi Goldberg is a household name; she's one of the few people to have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and a Tony. She currently hosts the talk show The View. Jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall's albums include The Look of Love, The Girl in the Other Room, From This Moment On, Quiet Nights and more. She has sold more albums than any other female jazz artist during the 1990s and 2000s. and is the the only jazz singer to have eight albums that debuted at the top of the Billboard Jazz Albums. She has won multiple Grammy Awards and Juno Awards.