American · b. 1971
Jeff Kinney worked on Diary of a Wimpy Kid for years before anyone printed it. The strip went up on the children's website Funbrain in 2004, free to millions of readers; Abrams published the first book in 2007, and the series has since sold hundreds of millions of copies in dozens of languages. Greg Heffley is not a hero. He is a middle-school schemer who ducks blame, drops friends when it suits him, and narrates his own bad behaviour without ever catching on — the joke every reader gets and Greg never does. Rodrick Rules, the second book, gives him an older brother who plays drums badly and knows exactly what Greg did over the summer. Kinney was born in Fort Washington, Maryland in 1971 and drew the comic strip Igdoof for the student paper at the University of Maryland. He spent years as a game designer and programmer, building the online children's world Poptropica, and now runs An Unlikely Story, a bookstore in Plainville, Massachusetts, with his wife.