Bill Amend
Bill Amend was born in 1962 in Northampton, Mass. He attended high school in Burlingame, Calif., where he contributed cartoons to the school newspaper and literary magazine. He served briefly as president of the math club and played tuba for the school band. He was active in Boy Scouts during this time, earning the rank of Eagle Scout.
Amend attended Amherst College, where he continued to draw cartoons via the twice-weekly college newspaper. In his sophomore year, he won one of the school's most prestigious math prizes, and in his junior year, he and a friend founded and published a weekly alternative campus newspaper. He majored in physics and graduated with honors in 1984.
After a brief stint in the animation and motion picture industries in San Francisco, he decided to pursue cartooning full time and signed with Universal Press Syndicate in the fall of 1987. His comic strip, FoxTrot, debuted April 10,1988, as a daily and Sunday strip, appearing in more than 1,000 newspapers worldwide. In January 2007, Amend took his popular strip to Sunday only in order to spend more time on other creative pursuits. FoxTrot has spawned more than 21 best-selling book collections. In May 2000, Amherst College awarded Bill an honorary doctorate in humane letters.
Amend lives in the Midwest with his wife and two children. Examples of his work can be found at www.amuniversal.com/ups.
