Briggs, Clare 1875 - 1930.

Clare A. Briggs was an early American comic strip artist who rose to fame in 1904 with his strip A. Piker Clerk. Briggs was best known for his later comic strips "When a Feller Needs a Friend," "Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling?" and "The Days of Real Sport". While attending the University of Nebraska for two years, he studied drawing and stenography. One of his art instructors was an editor with Western Penman, where his first published drawings appeared. On July 18, 1900, he married Ruth Owen of Lincoln. He began his career as a newspaper sketch artist in St. Louis, Missouri with William Randolph Hearst's Globe-Democrat, which sent him off to cover the Spanish American War as an editorial cartoonist. Relocating in New York, his drawings for the New York Journal prompted Hearst to send Briggs to the Chicago Herald and the Chicago's American, where he created A. Piker Clerk, often described as the first daily continuity comic strip. After 17 years in Chicago, Briggs returned to New York to spend the remaining 13 years of his life with the New York Tribune.