Biography about jeff kinney

Jeff Kinney is the best-selling author and illustrator of the wildly popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, featuring the everyday life of the very relatable adolescent Greg Heffley.

Kinney spent his childhood in the Washington, D.C. area and later moved to New England. As a young reader, Kinney was inspired by the books of Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, and J.R.R. Tolkien. While a student at the University of Maryland, Kinney decided he wanted to become a cartoonist.

Kinney began noodling ideas for the first A Diary of a Wimpy Kid book in , but it wasn&#;t until the spring of that the book was published and quickly became a New York Times bestseller, eventually reaching the number one spot. In , Kinney was named one of the 20 Artists & Entertainers in The TIME , the magazine&#;s list of The World&#;s Most Influential people. In , A Diary of a Wimpy Kid was made into a movie.

Kinney is also a successful online game developer, cartoonist, designer, and the creator of Poptropica, known by children around the world. Poptropica is an online role-playing game designed for kids 6 to 15 where players travel between islands to complete quests.

Kinney currently lives Plainville, Massachusetts with his wife Julie and their two sons, Will and Grant.

Learn more at the official Wimpy Kid website.

Books by this author

This article is about the author and cartoonist. For the former American football player, see Jeff Kinney (American football).

American author, cartoonist and screenwriter (born )

Jeffrey Patrick Kinney (born February 19, ) is an American author and cartoonist. He is best known for creating, writing and illustrating the children's book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He also created the child-oriented website Poptropica.

Early life

Kinney was born and raised in Fort Washington, Maryland. Kinney attended Potomac Landing Elementary School and later Bishop McNamara High School, where he graduated in He has an older brother and sister, and a younger brother. He is of Irish descent. He attended the University of Maryland, College Park, in the early s. It was in college that Kinney created a popular comic strip, Igdoof, which ran in the school student newspaper, The Diamondback. Kinney graduated from the University of Maryland in , originally majoring in computer science but switching to criminal justice in order to have more time to work on his comic. In he was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa as an alumnus of the University of Maryland.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series

In January , Kinney conceived the idea of a middle-school weakling named Greg Heffley, who writes illustrated stories about his personal life. In May , Funbrain and Jeff Kinney released an online version of the story, titled Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The website made daily entries from September of that year to June He worked on his book for almost eight years, before showing it to a publisher in New York City, U.S.

In February , during the New York Comic Con, Jeff signed a multi-book deal with publisher Harry N. Abrams, Inc., to turn Diary of a Wimpy Kid into a print series.

The book became an instant hit, with the online version receiving about 20 million views as of Whe

Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney didn’t grow up wanting to be a children’s author. His dream was to become a newspaper cartoonist but he wasn’t able to get his comic strip syndicated.

Jeff Kinney was born in in Maryland and attended the University of Maryland in the early s. It was there that Jeff ran a comic strip called “Igdoof” in the campus newspaper. He knew he wanted to be a cartoonist.

However, Jeff was not successful getting his comic strip syndicated after college, and in he started writing down ideas for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which he hoped to turn into a book. Jeff worked on the book for six years before publishing it online on in daily installments.

In , Jeff signed a multi-book deal with publisher Harry N. Abrams, Inc. to turn Diary of a Wimpy Kid into a print series. The first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book was published in and became an instant bestseller. Just a year later, more than , copies were in print in the United States alone. With each subsequent book, in-print numbers continue to grow exponentially both in the U.S. and abroad. There are now more than million copies of the series in print worldwide.

The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series has been a permanent fixture on the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. The series has remained on the New York Times bestseller lists since the publication of the first book, for more than weeks total, and more than on the series list. The books are currently available in 86 editions in 70 languages.

Since initial publication in , the series has gone on to win many regional and national awards around the globe including two Children’s Choice Book Awards and six Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards for Favorite Book. Jeff Kinney was also named one of Time magazine’s most influential people in the world.

Jeff is the creator of Poptropica, which was named one of Time’s 50 Best Websites. He spent his childhood i