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Growing up, Briggs lived in Reedsburg until 1884 when his parents moved to Dixon, Illinois, eventually settling in Lincoln, Nebraska. Life in the Midwest gave Briggs the source material for the small town Americana that he later depicted in his cartoons.
After attending the University of Nebraska, he began as a newspaper sketch artist in St. Louis, Missouri with William Randolph Hearst's Globe-Democrat, which sent him off to cover the Spanish American War as an editorial cartoonist. Relocating in New York, his drawings for the New York Journal prompted owner Hearst to send Briggs to work with the Chicago Herald and the Chicago's American, where he created A. Piker Clerk, one of the first daily continuity comic strips. After 17 years in Chicago, Briggs returned to New York to spend the remaining 13 years of his life with the New York Tribune.
Briggs was also a popular lecturer, earning $100 for a single speech. He accepted a five-week contract for $500 a week to appear on the vaudeville circuit in 1914. In 1919 he produced four comedy film shorts for Paramount Pictures.
National catch phrases caught on from the titles of some of his newspaper cartoon features: Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling?, Danny Dreamer, The Days of Real Sport, Movie of a Man, Someone's Always Taking the Joy Out of Life, There's at Least One in Every Office, Real Folks at Home and When a Feller Needs a Friend. His Mr. and Mrs. ran during the last years of his life and continued in syndication after his death under his name. The names of Arthur Folwell and Ellison Hoover finally appeared on the strip in 1938.
One of his children, Clare Briggs, Jr., also was a comic strip artist and had an eponymous strip syndicated from 1939 through 1941.
