Harold Lincoln Gray (January 20, 1894 – May 9, 1968) was an American cartoonist, best known as the creator of the newspaper comic strip Little Orphan Annie.

He married Winifred Frost in 1929, and the couple moved to Greens Farms, Connecticut, spending winters in La Jolla, California.

[6] By the 1930s, Little Orphan Annie had evolved from a crudely drawn melodrama to a crisply rendered atmospheric story with novelistic plot threads.

Critic Jeet Heer, who did his thesis on Gray and wrote introductions to IDW's Little Orphan Annie collections, commented: Gray wasn't really a conservative in the 1920s: he was more of a general populist, hostile to loan sharks and speculators while celebrating hard working ordinary people whether they're successful ("Daddy" Warbucks) or not (the poor struggling farmers, the Silos).

In the 1920s, Gray even defended labor unions, having Annie launch a successful one-girl strike against a boss who mistreats her.

Newspaper cartooning is like keeping a daily diary: even if you're writing only about the weather and shopping, bits of your personality will seep into the work.

In Gray's case, the strip reflected his flinty world view, his love of hard work, his populist spirit, and also his fear of those he thought were undermining society by their laziness and meanness.

You get a very strong sense of the man in his work, which is one reason it's one of the major comic strips ... Sidney Smith (creator of The Gumps) was a giant of his day whose place in history has largely been forgotten.

The collection contains a scrapbook, a short story by Gray titled "Annie", letters, postcards and telegrams from 1937 to 1967, including correspondence with Collier's, Purdue University, Al Capp and Mort Walker.