Harold Lincoln Gray was born near Kankakee, Illinois on January 20, 1894 to Ira Lincoln Gray, a farmer, and Estella M. Rosencrans. As a child, his family moved to a farm near West Lafayette, Indiana. Gray graduated from West Lafayette HightSchool in 1912. After graduation he entered Purdue University. During college he worked for the Lafayette Morning Journal creating cartoons and selling advertising. During his senior year at Purdue, Gray was the art editor of the Debris yearbook and drew politcal cartoons for it as well as for the Exponent newspaper. Gray graduated from Purdue in 1917 with a B. S. He enlisted during World War I and became a bayonet instructor reaching the rank of second lieutenant. After the war he obtained a job at the Chicago Tribune. He left the Tribune in 1921 to work for Sidney Smigh on the comic The Gumps. He began writing his cartoon, Little Orphan Annie, on August 5, 1924 for the New York Daily News. Gray married Doris C. Platt on Oct. 22, 1921; she died in 1925. On July 17, 1929, he married Winifred Frost, who helped him with his work. Gray passed away on May 10, 1968 in La Jolla, California.