Lincoln Peirce

Lincoln Peirce (pronounced "purse") is a cartoonist, best known for creating Big Nate.

Early life
Lincoln was born in Ames, Iowa, but grew up in Durham, New Hampshire. He grew an interest in comic strips at the age of around 7 or 8 years, where he read stuff like Peanuts and Doonesbury, and created his first comic strip ever in 4th grade, Super Jimmy. The strip was about a clumsy superhero, who was also a bucktoothed kid, just trying to do the right thing. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find an image for Super Jimmy, but if you can, it would be greatly appreciated. He notes in many interviews that the reason why Big Nate is centered on Middle School is because he has many memories of middle school. He attended Oyster River High School, where he made comic strips that savaged the teachers he didn't really care about, and graduated to Colby College in Maine, where he studied art. During his time at college, he created a comic strip for the school newspaper, called "Third Floor." It was basically a Doonesbury ripoff. He later earned a graduate degree from Brooklyn College and also studied at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. For 3 years, he coached baseball and taught art at Xavier High School before moving to Maine and started becoming a cartoonist.

Career
Lincoln started submitting a bunch of strips to major newspaper syndicates, almost all of them had the same results: they were rejected. He also created a local radio station on WMPG due to his love for counry music. He even created several animated shorts for both Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, and came up with a show called Spang Ho! He submitted a pilot episode to Cartoon Network, but it was unfortunately rejected. However, you can still view the pilot episode on Vimeo. Nowadays, he's either creating a Big Nate comic strip, or going to a school to give a presentation on cartooning.

Big Nate
One of the comic strip ideas that Lincoln sent to a major newspaper (in this case, United Media) was called Neighborhood Comix, a strip based off of his childhood in New Hampshire, with then characters loosely based off of his friends. The 2 main characters were Nate and Marty, who are also characters in Big Nate. However, instead of being son and father respectively, they were actually brothers, with Marty's personality being more similar to Nate's personality in Neighborhood Comix. While United Media liked the idea, they thought that Nate resembled Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes a bit too much, so Lincoln decided to merge Nate and Marty into one: He kept Nate's name and overall appearance while tweaking it a bit (like changing his hair into spiky hair) and Marty's personality. When he was a child, he often called his brother Jon "Big Nate", so he used this nickname as the name for his new comic strip to solidify Nate being the main character for this strip. After about a year and a half of blood, sweat, and tears, he finally released his first comic strip on January 7, 1991. Many years later, he created his first Big Nate novel, Big Nate: In a class by himself, in partnership with Jeff Kinney, known author of the Diary of a Wimpy kid series. He created several more Big Nate novels before ending it at Big Nate: Blasts Off, on February 16, 2016.

List of Big Nate books
Here are a list of Big Nate collections and when they were released (either published by Andrew McMeel publishing or HarperCollins): Another Big Nate collection, Big Nate: Silent But Deadly will be released on March 20, 2018, and will feature strips appearing in newspapers from October 6, 2013 to March 29, 2014.
 * Add More Babes!: Awesome Big Nate Comics- January 7, 1992
 * Big Nate: Dibs on this Chair- 2001
 * Big Nate: Pray for a Fire Drill- 2001
 * Bignate.gifBig Nate: Makes a Splash- 2001
 * I Smell a Pop Quiz!: A Big Nate Book- June 7, 2008
 * Big Nate: From the Top- October 19, 2010
 * Big Nate: Out Loud- April 26, 2011
 * Big Nate And Friends- December 6, 2011
 * Big Nate: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?- May 8, 2012
 * Big Nate: Here Goes Nothing- August 21, 2012
 * Big Nate Makes the Grade- August 21, 2012
 * Big Nate: All Work and No Play (A Collection of Big Nate Sundays)- October 16, 2012
 * Big Nate: Game On!-  April 2, 2013
 * Big Nate: Genius Mode- May 7, 2013
 * Big Nate: I Can't Take It!- October 15, 2013
 * Big Nate: Great Minds Think Alike- April fools day
 * Big Nate: Mr. Popularity- May 6, 2014
 * Big Nate: The Crowd Goes Wild- October 14, 2014
 * Big Nate: Greatest Hits (Pray for a Fire Drill, Dibs on the Chair, and Makes a Splash)- January 7, 2015
 * Big Nate: Say Good-Bye To Dork City- March 17, 2015
 * Big Nate: Welcome To My World- September 22, 2015
 * Big Nate: Thunka, Thunka, Thunka- March 1, 2016
 * Big Nate: Revenge of the Cream Puffs- September 6, 2016
 * The Epic Big Nate- October 25, 2016
 * Big Nate: What's a Little Noogie Between Friends?- February 28, 2017
 * Big Nate: A Good Old Fashioned Wedgie- August 29, 2017

Here is a list of all the Big Nate novels:
 * 1) Big Nate: In a Class by Himself- March 23, 2010
 * 2) Big Nate Strikes Again- October 19, 2010
 * 3) Big Nate: On a Roll- August 16, 2011 
 * 4) Big Nate Goes for Broke- 
 * 5) Big Nate Flips out-
 * 6) Big Nate: In the zone- 
 * 7) Big Nate Lives it up-
 * 8) Big Nate: Blasts Off-