Childhood Seriousness.

The comic strip Peanuts, written and drawn by Charles Schulz, was immensely popular in the 1950s. First syndicated in eight newspapers in 1950, the comic strip Peanuts was the most successful strip of the decade. By the end of the 1950s the strip appeared in more than four hundred newspapers in the United States and in thirty-five foreign papers. The strip was notable in that its characters, all children, acted and talked through their childhood activities with all the seriousness and insecurities of adults. As the Saturday Evening Post commented in 1957, readers of the comic strip imagined Schulz as a "superintellectual."

Mistaken Intellectual.

In 1956 a staffer for Adlai Stevenson telephoned Schulz to ask him to support her candidate. During their conversation she called Schulz, on the basis of his comic strip Peanuts, "the youngest existentialist." Schulz politely declined to endorse Stevenson but did have...