This article is about the author and cartoonist. For the former American football player, see Jeff Kinney (American football). Jeff Kinney was born and raised in Fort Washington, Maryland. Kinney attended Potomac Landing Elementary School and later Bishop McNamara High School, where he graduated in 1989. He has an older brother and sister, and a younger brother.[2] He is of Irish descent He attended the University of Maryland, College Park in the early 1990s. It was in college that Kinney created a popular comic strip, Igdoof, which ran in the school student newspaper, The Diamondback Kinney graduated from the University of Maryland in 1993, originally majoring in computer science but switched to criminal justice in order to have more time to work on his comic In 2021 he was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa as an alumnus of the University of Maryland. In January 1998, Kinney brought up the idea of a middle-school weakling named Greg Heffley, who writes illustrated stories about his personal life. In May 2004, FunBrain and Jeff Kinney released an online version of the story, titled Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The website made daily entries until June 2005He worked on his book for almost eight years, before showing it to a publisher in New York City, U.S.A In February 2006, during the New York Comic Con, Jeff signed a multi-book deal with publisher Harry N. Abrams, Inc., to turn Diary of a Wimpy Kid into a print series.]The book became an instant hit, with the online version receiving about 20 million views as of 2007. When many online readers requested a printed version, Kinney agreed, and in April 2007, Diary of a Wimpy Kid was published.[6] To date, eighteen Wimpy Kid books have been released, including a movie diary and a Do-It-Yourself Book, and a biography that Greg’s best friend Rowley Jefferson wrote.[8] In April 2009, TIME named Kinney one of The World's Most Influential People.[9] In 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2016 the series won a Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award for Favorite Book.[10] The series is still ongoing.