Douglas Coupland was born December 30, 1961 on a Canadian military base in Baden-Soellingen, Germany. He graduated from Sentinel Secondary School in West Vancouver in 1979 and went on to McGill University. He was unhappy there and went on to Emily Carr College of Art and Design. He has said that these were the best four years of his life. He graduated in 1984 with a focus on sculpture and moved on to study at the European Design Institute in Milan. He also completed a two-year course in Japanese business science in Hawaii in 1986.He soon began writing for magazines as a means of paying the bills. He soon started work on his first novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture which… was published in 1991. His second novel Shampoo Planet focused on the generation after Generation X and was published in 1992. This generation was termed "Global Teens". His career has consisted of writing, sculpting, and editing and he also hosted The Search for Generation X, a PBS documentary, 1991. Douglas Coupland has also worked on a magazine called Wired . He wrote a short story about the life of the employees of Mocrosoft Corporation. This short story provided inspiration for his novel Microserfs.