A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and the UCLA School of Law, he worked as a lawyer before trying his hand at cartooning. He is is the creator of Pearls Before Swine, an acclaimed comic strip that appears in more than six hundred newspapers and boasts a devoted following. His 2011 compilation Larry in Wonderland debuted at #1 on the "New York Times" bestseller list for paperback graphic novels. Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made was his first book for young readers. He lives in Northern California, in the Bay Area, with his wife and two children.