Clare Briggs was born in 1875 in Wisconsin and died in 1930 in New York City.

His newspaper career began in 1896 as a sketch artist for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. In 1898 he was hired by the St. Louis Chronicle as a political cartoonist. As his work was limited to drawing war-related cartoons, he lost his job when the Spanish-American War ended in 1899. That same year he relocated to New York where he studied art at Pratt Institute and contributed cartoons to both the New York World and the New York Journal. In 1900, William Randolph Hearst hired Briggs and sent him to Chicago as a cartoonist for the Chicago American and Chicago Examiner. Briggs rise to fame as a cartoonist began with a comic strip called "A. Piker, Clerk," which ran in both of these papers. Beginning in 1904, "A. Piker, Clerk" is considered to be among the first daily comic strips. Unfortunately, it was canceled by Hearst just as its popularity was beginning. In 1907, Briggs secured a position with the Chicago Tribune, where he developed "Oh Skinnay, In the Days of Real Sport" loosely based on his own boyhood adventures. He transferred his affiliation yet again in 1914, becoming a cartoonist for the New York Herald-Tribune, where he remained until his death.

By 1920 Briggs was listed as one of the country's highest paid cartoonists in the Literary Digest. He was a member of the Illustrators' Society and the Lambs Club in New York.