Matthew Abram Groening ( GRAY-ning) (born February 15, 1954) is an American cartoonist, television producer and writer from Portland, Oregon, best known as the creator of The Simpsons and Futurama and the author of the weekly comic strip Life in Hell. Groening distributed Life in Hell in the book corner of Licorice Pizza, a record store in which he worked. He made his first professional cartoon sale to the avant-garde Wet magazine in 1978. The cartoon is still carried in 250 weekly newspapers.

Life in Hell caught the attention of James L. Brooks. In 1985, Brooks contacted Groening with the proposition of working in animation for the FOX variety show The Tracey Ullman Show. Originally, Brooks wanted Groening to adapt his Life in Hell characters for the show. Fearing the loss of ownership rights, Groening decided to create something new and came up with a cartoon family, the Simpsons and named the members after his own parents and sisters  while Bart was an anagram of the word brat. The shorts would be spun off into their own series: The Simpsons, which has since aired over 400 episodes in 19 seasons. In 1997, Groening got together with David X. Cohen and developed Futurama, an animated series about life in the year 3000, which premiered in 1999. After four years on the air, the show was cancelled by Fox in 2003, but Comedy Central commissioned 16 new episodes from 4 Direct-to-DVD Movies to be aired in 2008.

Groening has won 11 Primetime Emmy Awards, ten for The Simpsons and one for Futurama as well as a British Comedy Award for "outstanding contribution to comedy" in 2004. In 2002, he won the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for his work on Life in Hell.

Early life

Groening was born on February 15, 1954 in Portland, Oregon USA. He grew up in Portland,Matt Groening's Simpsons profile thesimpsons.com. Retrieved on March 4, 2007 the middle child of five children. His mother, Margaret Wiggum, was once a teacher, and his father, Homer Philip Groening, was a filmmaker, advertiser, writer and cartoonist. Homer, born in Main Centre, Saskatchewan, Canada, grew up in a Mennonite, Plattdeutsch-speaking family. Matt's grandfather Abram Groening was a professor at Tabor College, a Mennonite Brethren liberal arts college in Hillsboro, Kansas before moving to Albany College (now known as Lewis and Clark College) in Oregon in 1930.

From 1972 to 1977, Groening attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, a liberal school which he described as "a hippie college, with no grades or required classes, that drew every weirdo in the Northwest." He served as the editor of the campus newspaper, The Cooper Point Journal, for which he also wrote articles and drew cartoons. He befriended fellow cartoonist Lynda Barry after discovering that she had written a fan letter to Joseph Heller, one of Groening's favorite authors, and had gotten a reply back. Groening has credited Barry with being "probably 1 biggest inspiration." He has also cited the Disney animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians as what got him into cartoons.