Chester Gould (November 20,1900 – May 11, 1985) was the creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip, which he wrote and drew from 1931 to 1977. Gould was best known for his colorful, often monstrous, villains.

Chester Gould was born and raised in Pawnee, Oklahoma. In 1919, his family moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma where he attended Oklahoma A & M (now Oklahoma State University) until 1921. That year, he moved to Chicago, Illinois where he graduated from Northwestern University in 1923. In 1931, Gould was hired as a cartoonist with the Chicago Tribune and introduced the Dick Tracy cartoon. He drew the comic strip for the next for 46 years.

Late in the period of Gould's control of it, the Tracy strip became somewhat controversial in some markets. Tracy was considered to be too right-wing and the strip generally too worshipful of the police, with some saying that Gould was using the strip to push his own right-wing agenda such as attacking the rights of the accused. It is hard to determine the extent to which this affected the strip's following, which was diminishing, and how much of it was part of two other trends; a natural tendency for the audience for a comic strip to dwindle over time after plateauing, and the overall trend away from strips with continuing story lines toward those whose stories are largely resolved within one series of panels.

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Commemorative Mural in Pawnee