Jean-Jacques Sempé was born in Bordeaux on August 17, 1932. A very undisciplined student, he was expelled from his college and started working at the age of seventeen.After having been the unlucky assistant of a wine broker and enlisting in the army, he launched himself into cartooning at the age of nineteen.His beginnings were difficult, but Sempé worked like a madman.He collaborated with numerous magazines: Paris Match, L'Express… In 1959, he “brought into the world” the Petit Nicolas series with his friend René Goscinny. Sempé lives in Paris (dreaming of the countryside) and in the countryside (dreaming of Paris).He has since published around forty albums with Denoël.In 2009, Sempé in New York was published, a collection of around a hundred New Yorker covers, with which Sempé has been a collaborator since 1978. In the Folio Junior collection, he is the author of Marcellin Caillou (1997) and Raoul Taburin (1998);he also illustrated Catherine Certitude by Patrick Modiano (1998) and L'histoire de Monsieur Sommer by Patrick Süskind (1998). René Goscinny was born in Paris in 1926 but spent his childhood in Argentina.“I was a real jerk in class.As I was also a rather good student, I was not expelled”.After a brilliant education at the French college in Buenos Aires, he began his career in New York alongside Harvey Kurtzman, founder of Mad.Back in France in the 1950s, he collected successes.
