Annie is a Broadway musical, which was adapted from the famous comic strip by musical, with a book written by Charnin first approached Meehan to write the book of a musical about Little Orphan Annie in 1972. Meehan researched by re-reading prints of the comic strip, but was unable to find any satisfactory material for a musical other than the characters of Annie, Oliver Warbucks and Sandy, so decided to write his own story. As all three of Meehan, Charnin and Strouse were from New York and given what he saw as the downbeat mood of the then-current Nixon era and the Vietnam War, Meehan set his story in New York during the similarly downbeat Great Depression. Meehan saw the character of Annie as a 20th Century American female version of the titular orphan characters created by Charles Dickens in works such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield with the mystery of Annie's abandonment and unknown parenthood as consistent with a strand of mysteries in Dickens' tales. Meehan's book was accepted by Charnin and Strouse, but considerable material had to be trimmed out – material which Meehan would later restore for his novelisation.