Lincoln Peirce

Lincoln Peirce is an American cartoonist and author best known for creating Big Nate, a comic strip following the mischievous, endlessly self-confident sixth-grader Nate Wright that has run in national newspaper syndication since 1991 and was later adapted into the illustrated middle-grade Big Nate book series starting in 2010. Peirce draws directly on his own childhood, including his experience attending a private school on scholarship, to give Nate's school-centered misadventures a grounded, lived-in comic sensibility beneath the exaggerated cartoon style. The book series adopts a diary-and-doodle format similar in spirit to other illustrated middle-grade hits, mixing prose narration with Nate's own comic-strip-style drawings. The franchise expanded further with a Nickelodeon and Paramount+ animated television series, Big Nate, which began streaming in 2022 and introduced the character to a new generation of viewers alongside the books and the long-running newspaper strip. New readers should start with the first Big Nate novel, Big Nate: In a Class by Himself, to meet Nate and his friends from the beginning. Peirce continues to write and draw the newspaper strip alongside new entries in the book series, maintaining an unusually long-running dual career as both syndicated cartoonist and children's author.