Scott Adams was born and raised in Windham, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. He has lived and worked in California since 1979.
He holds a B.A. in economics from Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley. He's also a certified hypnotist.
Adams held a variety of — in his words — "humiliating and low paying jobs" during his eight years at Crocker National Bank and eight years at Pacific Bell. He's been a bank teller (he was robbed twice at gunpoint), computer programmer, financial analyst, product manager, commercial lender, budget manager, strategist, project manager and pseudo-engineer.
During this time, Adams entertained himself during boring meetings by drawing insulting cartoons of his co-workers and bosses. Eventually, a bespectacled character named Dilbert emerged from the doodles. In 1988, Adams mailed some sample comic strips featuring Dilbert to the major cartoon syndicates. United Feature Syndicate plucked Dilbert out of thousands of submissions received that year and offered Adams a contract. Dilbert launched in about 50 newspapers in 1989.
Adams continued his day job at Pacific Bell until 1995, drawing Dilbert at 5 a.m. everyday before work. Now Adams devotes his entire day (and much of the evening) to Dilbert, including speaking, writing, doing interviews, designing licensed products and answering hundreds of e-mail messages per day. He owns two restaurants and is CEO of Scott Adams Foods, Inc., a vegetarian food company.
Dilbert appears in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and is translated into 19 languages. Scott Adams has numerous books in print, with more than 10 million sold, including several number-one New York Times bestsellers.
In 1997, he received cartooning's highest honor, the Reuben Award. In addition to the many Dilbert books, Scott Adams is the author of two non-fiction books: Gods Debris (2001) and Religion War, the sequel to Gods Debris.
In November of 2005, Scott Adams brought Dilbert and the gang back for his 26th Dilbert collection, Thriving on Vague Objectives. In 2007 he released the book, Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Explains Cloning, Blouse Monsters, Voting Machines, Romance, Monkey Gods, How to Avoid Being Mistaken for a Rodent, and More, which is a compilation of his many blog entries.
