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Author Description I grew up in Nyack, New York, just up the street from the Hudson River. In our house, there was always an art project going on.<br /><br />My early drawings were very animated: a lot of stuff zipping around, airplanes, racing cars, football players. No surprise my first published drawing was a pack of rats running along a highway (The Rat Race). I did that for the <i>New York Times</i> Op Ed page when I was still in high school.<br /><br />I went to college at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. I studied painting, sculpture and filmmaking, but what I loved doing most—in my spare time—was drawing cartoons and comic strips.<br /><br />When I graduated, I hauled my pile of doodles into the offices of a bunch of editors, with the wild notion that somebody might publish them. When that failed, I wrote a story for kids to go with my pictures (<i>If Snow Falls</i>). It was two sentences long (which counts, by the way). Frances Foster, a wonderful editor at Random House, saw something in that book and signed me up.<br /><br />The next book, <i>Ellsworth</i>, was about a dog who teaches economics at a university. When he gets home, he throws off his clothes and acts like a dog, which is fine, until some fellow teachers discover this and he loses his job. Somebody told me that <i>Ellsworth</i> was a story about "being yourself." I never realized it had a moral.<br /><br />I moved to another publisher with <i>Ludlow Laughs</i>, the story of a grumpy guy who laughs in his sleep. This book was doing very poorly until the comedienne Phyliss Diller read it on PBS's <i>Reading Rainbow</i>. It stayed in print for over twenty years.<br /><br />My fourth book, <i>The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau</i>, was a hit. One of the first people to see it and give it the thumb's up—literally, hot off the press—was Maurice Sendak. We bumped into each other at the printers. It was a lucky first meeting, and happily not our last.<br /><br />That was all a long time ago. Since then I've written many other picture books, illustrated a few by other authors, and created a series of offbeat wordplay books, beginning with the book of palindromes, <i>Go Hang a Salami! I'm a Lasagna Hog!</i><br /><br />I visit schools across the country and sometimes around the globe. I live with my wife, Audrey, in San Francisco.

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