Scott Adams was born and raised in Windham, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. He moved to Northern California in 1979 after college and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since then.

He holds a BA 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 so if you meet him and he starts waving a watch at you, run!

Adams held a variety of-in his words-"humiliating and low-paying jobs" during his eight years at Crocker National Bank and nine 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 was launched in about 50 newspapers in 1989.

Adams continued his day job at Pacific Bell until 1995, drawing Dilbert every day before work. Now Adams devotes his entire day (and much of the evening) to Dilbert, including speaking, writing, doing interviews, designing artwork for licensed products and answering hundreds of e-mail messages per day.

Dilbert is published in over 1,200 newspapers worldwide, on its own web site and in more than a million books.