Lincoln Peirce

Lincoln Peirce (born 23 October 1963) is an American cartoonist and children's author who created Big Nate, a newspaper comic strip since 1991 and a series of illustrated novels since 2010.

Peirce was born in Ames, Iowa. He earned a BA from Colby College and an MFA from Brooklyn College. Big Nate launched in January 1991 in 135 newspapers; sources give the start as 6 or 7 January. Wikipedia lists the Newspaper Enterprise Association as its syndicate and says it now runs in more than 400 newspapers.

The first Big Nate novel, Big Nate: In a Class by Himself, was published by HarperCollins on 23 March 2010, and Wikipedia's bibliography lists eight novels for young readers. Wikipedia counts forty-four Big Nate books in total, combining strip collections and novels. Peirce also began a second series, Max and the Midknights, in January 2019 with Penguin Random House. An animated Big Nate series debuted on Paramount+ in February 2022 and moved to Nickelodeon that September, and a Max and the Midknights cartoon followed in 2024.

For collectors. Strip collections came before the novels; Open Library records Andrews McMeel Publishing among the publishers of early compilations such as Big Nate: I Smell a Pop Quiz! The first HarperCollins novel of 2010 marks the series' move into children's fiction.