Matt Groening was born in Portland, Oregon, and educated at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Moving to Los Angeles, California, in 1977 with the intention of becoming a writer, Groening instead began to record his reactions to the city and to life in a comic strip, �Life in Hell.� The strip appeared for the first time in 1980 in the weekly Los Angeles Reader, of which he was then circulation manager. A year later, the comic went into syndication, appearing in 20 newspapers by 1983. Beginning with Love Is Hell (1984), several collections of his cartoon strips were published.