Wrote children’s book ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’
Norton Juster — the celebrated children’s author who fashioned a world of adventure and punning punditry in the millionselling classic “The Phantom Tollbooth” and remained true to his wideeyed self in such favorites as “The Dot and the Line” and “Stark Naked” — has died at 91.
Juster’s death was confirmed Tuesday by a Random House Children’s
Books spokesperson who did not immediately provide details. Juster’s friend and fellow author Mo Willems tweeted Tuesday that Juster “ran out of stories” and died “peacefully” the night before.
“Norton’s greatest work was himself: a tapestry of delightful tales,” Willems wrote.
“The Phantom Tollbooth,” published in 1961, followed the adventures of young Milo through the Kingdom of Wisdom, a land extending from The Foothills of Confusion to The Valley of Sound, populated by the imperiled princesses Rhyme and Reason and the fearsome Gorgons of Hate and Malice.
As Juster wrote in the introduction to a 1999 reissue of “The Phantom Tollbooth,” he first thought of the book when he was in his late 20s and working at an architectural firm in New York City. He found himself wondering, the way a child might, about how people relate to the world around them.
He had received a grant for a book on urban planning and spent months researching it before a boy’s “startling” question — overheard by Juster in a restaurant — changed his narrative and changed his life: “What’s the biggest number there is?”
“I started to compose what I thought would be about a child’s confrontation with numbers and words and meanings and other strange concepts that are imposed on children,” he wrote. “I loved the opportunity to turn things upside down and inside out and indulge in all the bad jokes and puns and wordplay that my father had introduced me to when I was growing up.”
Juster, a native of New York City, was the son and brother of architects and he never turned entirely from his family craft. He continued to write books, while co-founding the architectural firm Juster Pope Associates, in Shelburne Falls, Mass.
Juster’s wife of 54 years, Jeanne, died in 2018. They had a daughter, Emily.