
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. Schulz stated that his routine every morning consisted of eating a jelly donut and sitting down to write the day's strip. At its peak, Peanuts appeared in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. 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. From 1956 to 1965 he contributed a single-panel strip ("Young Pillars") featuring teenagers to Youth, a publication associated with the Church of God.

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. The strip became one of the most popular comic strips of all time. 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. Li'l Folks was dropped from the Pioneer Press in January, 1950. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. In 1948, Schulz tried to have Li'l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association. 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. The series also had a dog that looked much like Snoopy.

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. Schulz's first regular cartoons, Li'l Folks, were published from 1947 to 1950 by the St. 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.
