From Publishers Weekly: ‘Phantom Tollbooth‘ Author Dies at 91…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now! 

Children’s author Norton Juster, widely praised for the wordplay in his clever and whimsical books for young readers, including the much-loved The Phantom Tollbooth, died on March 8 at his home in Northampton, Mass., following complications from a recent stroke. He was 91.

Juster was born June 2, 1929 in Brooklyn, N.Y. and grew up there, graduating from James Madison High School. He earned his B.A. in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952, the same year he won a Fulbright fellowship to pursue graduate study in city planning at the University of Liverpool’s School of Architecture in England. Juster served in the U.S. Navy from 1954–1957, where his assignments in the Civil Engineering Corps included building airfields in Morocco and Newfoundland. Following his military service, Juster returned to New York and received a grant from the Ford Foundation to write a book about urban perceptions.

But instead of completing that project, he began writing a story inspired by his own childhood about “a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.” Juster kept at it, writing in his off hours, while living in an apartment in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone. He showed early drafts of the tale to his friend and housemate, Jules Feiffer, a young Village Voice cartoonist who soon produced some sketches to illustrate the story. The project went on to be Juster’s first novel, The Phantom Tollbooth (Random House, 1961). The colorful backstory of Tollbooth’s inception is the subject of a 2013 documentary, The Phantom Tollbooth: Beyond Expectations, directed by Hannah Jayanti.

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