"Peanuts" [is] the evocative, touching and wise comic strip that has quietly become an American institution. As unpretentious as Schulz himself, the strip has restored to use idioms of a simpler day: "Good grief," "Rats!" and "You blockhead." It has invented the cult of the Great Pumpkin, and the concept of the Failure Face. It has given the world a dozen definitions of happiness and a store of homespun philosophical reflections…. It has expressed what may be the quintessential American lament: "How can we lose when we're so sincere?"…

The magic begins with the characters, an appealing lot whose foibles, anxieties and frustrations make a human comedy that hovers always on the lip of despair. (p. 40)

[Throughout the years] the strip itself has changed in subtle ways—the features are sharper now, the dialogue more sophisticated, the heads larger in relation to the bodies…. Schulz's dialogue has always...