Dilbert, the United Feature Syndicate comic strip by Scott Adams, is the most photocopied, pinned-up, downloaded, faxed and e-mailed comic strip in the world. Dilbert is the comic strip for everyone who thinks they are surrounded by idiots. Sporting a growth curve that would be the envy of any corporation, Dilbert is the fastest-growing comic strip in newspapers, appearing in more than 800 papers in 23 countries including The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The New York Daily News and The San Francisco Examiner.

Dilbert stars a "socially challenged" engineer and his sarcastic dog, Dogbert, whose true calling is to rule the world, since he believes people are basically too stupid to stop him.

Scott Adams' former "day job" as an applications engineer at Pacific Bell has given him plenty of experience with technology, engineers, bureaucracy and the general absurdities of corporate life. The Dilbert character evolved from Adams' work experiences. "I noticed that many of my co-workers had eerily similar, potato-shaped bodies," says Adams. "I started sketching them during boring meetings and eventually they melded into Dilbert." Scott Adams' first published version of Dilbert was a winning entry in a "People Who Look Like Their Dogs" contest in The San Francisco Chronicle in 1987.

Scott Adams was born and raised in Windham, N.Y., in the Catskill mountains. He holds a BA in economics from Hartwick College, Oneonta, N.Y., and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked in a number of humiliating and low-paying jobs involving technology and finances, including as a bank teller (he was robbed twice at gunpoint), computer programmer, financial analyst, product manager and commercial lender. He is a certified hypnotist.