Matthew Harold Sparber was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on May 8, 1968; at 11 days of age he was adopted. His adoptive parents, Claire Kestenbaum and Sheldon Sparber, were a Jewish couple of East European descent from New York, and both worked in medical fields, Claire as a pharmacist, Sheldon as a professor of pyschopharmacology at the University of Minnesota. Little is known about Matthew Sparber's biological parents, except that both were college graduates and they were presumably of English/Irish extraction. Matthew was named after Sheldon's uncle Max, a rare book dealer; at age 17 Matthew took the name Max as a nickname, and it is the name he has been known by for his entire adult life.

Max has several notable relatives. On his mother's side, Max is a second cousin to Emmy award-winning actor Judd Hirsch, and is a direct descendant of Ze'ev Wolf Kitzis, one of the founders of Hasidism and a disciple of the Ba'al Shem Tov. On his father's side, Max is a distant cousin to  Grammy Award-winning composer, Lalo Shifrin.

Max was raised in Minneapolis and the nearby suburb of St. Louis Park for most of his childhood, and had as babysitters Matt and Dan Wilson of the bands Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic.

Max attended a Jewish high school in Minneapolis, Maimonides High School, as well as Minnetonka High School, where he was active in school theatrical productions and student publishing. He graduated high school in 1986 and attended college at the University of Minnesota, returning, on and off, throughout his adult life, at first pursuing a degree in Jewish Studies, and later a degree in Theater.

Max moved to Los Angeles in May of 1990, hoping to pursue a career in screenwriting. He quickly found himself homeless, and ended up spending three months in a homeless shelter run by the Gay/Lesbian Community Center of Los Angeles. He then spent a year renting an apartment through the Teen Canteen, an organization tasked with assisting LA's large community of homeless youth.

Through the Teen Canteen, Sparber became involved with an acting program led by Academy Award-winning actress Shelley Winters. The program was short-lived and contentious, lasting about a year (with Winters herself dropping out after six months), but Max wound up writing two plays for the program, neither of which have ever been produced.

Max worked at a video rental store in Westwood, and was attacked during a race riot that erupted shortly after the beating of Rodney King, when the film New Jack City opened. He was also in Los Angeles for the riots that followed the Rodney King trials, and shortly after that moved back to Minneapolis, where he became active in an active anarcho-punk scene that had developed in the Twin Cities, in part under the influence of the magazine Profane Existence.

Max returned to Los Angeles in 1996 for six months, again looking for work as a writer, but quickly became discouraged. At the prompting of a friend, he moved to Omaha, Nebraska, and quickly became associated with the Blue Barn Theatre, a black box theater company that focused on contemporary American plays. Max wrote a play for the theater's 1998 season based on a 1919 lynching that occurred in downtown Omaha. Titled Minstrel Show, or The Lynching of William Brown, Max's play retold the incident through the point of view of two itinerant African American blackface performers. Although the play was condemned by state senator Ernie Chambers, who had not seen it but called for a black boycott of the play, Minstrel Show opened to rave reviews and sold-out audiences. It has since been performed throughout the country, including three productions in New York.

Max also began work at The Omaha Reader, an independent newsweekly. Starting as a film critic, Max quickly moved into a position as editor, and, after a few years, took over as the paper's editor-in-chief.

Max has continued to work in the world of newsweeklies, returning to Minneapolis in 2000 to work at City Pages as a theater critic, a position he held for three years. He also worked as an editorial layout designer, returning to Omaha for two years to work in The Reader's design department, as well as doing editorial design for Pulse of the Twin Cities for more than a year.

Max moved to New Orleans in the fall of 2004, living in the French Quarter, until he fled the city, along with nearly a million other residents of New Orleans, when mandatory evacuations were instituted in advance of Hurricane Katrina. While he lived in New Orleans, Max purchased a ventriloquist dummy in the form of a heavily pierced and tattooed sailor. Max named the puppet Sailor Martin and began making short digital films, splicing the puppet into old public domain educational movies. He has continued making these films to this day, as well as recording music as Sailor Martin by singing new lyrics over public domain popular songs. Max briefly performed with the dummy in the streets of the French Quarter, as well as worked as the opening act for a New Orleans burlesque troupe.

Max began blogging in 2000, at first editing an online poetry magazine called Doggerel Weekly, that specialized in bawdy themes and black humor. This later turned into Bawd, a personal blog that explored the same themes.

Since then, Max has started a number of blogs detailing a variety of projects, including horror makeup, his work as a playwright, the culture of the cocktail, and supernaturally themed music. Lately, Max has been redacting all these projects into a single blog, 50000000 Sparber Fans Can't Be Wrong (http://sparberfans.blogspot.com/). Since May of 2007, Max has worked as editor of MnSpeak, a popular Twin Cities online forum.

Additionally, Max was a cast member of Chasing Windmills, a six-month-long experiment in producing short digital movies every weekday. Max also helped produce and appeared in a series of semi-documentary digital films for the online version of Minneapolis's Rake Magazine.

Max has continued to work as a playwright, enjoying between one and two productions of his plays every year. He has written more than a dozen plays, many of them appearing at Omaha's Blue Barn Theatre, where Max had his first play produced. Additionally, Max was the first featured playwright in Edward Albee's Great Plains Theatre Festival.