Clare Briggs
American cartoonist (1875-1930)
Clare A. Briggs (August 5, 1875 – January 3, 1930) 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?, The Days of Real Sport, and Mr. and Mrs.
Early life
Born in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, Briggs lived there until the age of nine. In 1884, his family moved to Dixon, Illinois, where he started his newspaper career at age ten, delivering the local paper to subscribers for 40 cents a week while wearing a red, white and blue cap with the name of the newspaper.
Briggs had three brothers, who grew up to all have creative careers, one as a musician, one as a writer, and the third in advertising. After five years in Dixon, Briggs was 14 when his family relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he lived until 1896 when he was 21. Life in the Midwest gave Briggs the source material for the small town Americana that he later depicted in his cartoons.
A push from Pershing
While attending the University of Nebraska for two years, he studied drawing and stenography. Employment as a stenographer brought him six dollars a week when the work was available.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4122036. VIAF identifies the subject as 33697255. The Library of Congress control number is n94121599. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1875, 1930, 1904 and 1884.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clare Briggs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.