Norton Juster, author of 'The Phantom Tollbooth,' dies at 91 from stroke complications
Norton Juster, the USA TODAY bestselling author best known for writing "The Phantom Tollbooth," died Monday following complications from a recent stroke. He was 91.
Dominique Cimina, Random House Children's Books executive director of publicity confirmed to USA TODAY that Juster died at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts.
His first and best-known work, “The Phantom Tollbooth,” about Milo, a bored 10-year-old who comes home to find a magical toy tollbooth sitting in his room, would go on to win the George C. Stone Centre for Children's Book Award. The book was also made into a feature film in 1970 and later a musical.
Drawings were provided by his roommate at the time, Jules Feiffer, who would later collaborate with Juster on “The Odious Ogre,” published in 2010. Eric Carle of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” fame illustrated Juster’s “Otter Nonsense,” which came out in 1982.
Born in Brooklyn in 1929, Juster studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent a year in Liverpool, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship, doing graduate work in urban planning.
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After spending three years in the U.S. Navy (1954-1957), he began work as an architect in New York, eventually opening his own firm. He would later teach architecture and planning at Pratt Institute of New York and was a professor of design at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He retired from both to continue writing.
"Tollbooth" began when Juster, who had just left the Navy and was working as an architect, received a grant from the Ford Foundation for a children’s book about cities.
“I submitted a grant to do a children's book about urban aesthetics, how you experience and use cities," Juster explained in a 2001 interview with Salon.com. "In six months I was up to my neck in 3-by-5 cards and I realized I was not really enjoying myself. I took a break to visit some friends at the beach and to take my mind off of it, and I began doing what I thought was a little story, going nowhere, just to clear my head. It just kept going… When I had about 50 pages a friend took it to Random House, and they liked it and offered me a contract to finish the book.”
Juster 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, Massachusetts, and his stories often combined his seemingly opposite gifts for structure and absurdity.
“The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Mathematics” is a love triangle as only Juster could have imagined — between a straight and straight-laced line, a dotty dot and a swinging squiggle. (Animator Chuck Jones adapted it into an Oscar-winning short film).
“Stark Naked” finds an undressed protagonist wandering in the town of Emotional Heights, encountering such characters as the intellectual Noel Lott and school principal Martin Nett.
Juster’s more recent stories included “The Hello, Goodbye Window,” for which illustrator Chris Raschka received a Caldecott Medal, and the sequel “Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie.” One project he never got around to: that book on urban planning.
“The funny thing is that many of the things I was thinking about for that book did find their way into ‘The Phantom Tollbooth,’” he wrote in 1999. “Maybe someday I’ll get back to it when I’m trying to avoid doing something else.”
On the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Phantom Tollbooth,” Adam Gopnick, writing for the New Yorker, cited the importance of Juster’s work. "So to note the fiftieth birthday of the closest thing that American literature has to an 'Alice in Wonderland' of its own, Norton Juster’s 'The Phantom Tollbooth'—with illustrations, by Jules Feiffer, that are as perfectly matched to Juster’s text as Tenniel’s were to Carroll’s—is to mark an anniversary that matters."
Juster is survived by his daughter Emily, granddaughter Tori and several sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews. His wife, Jeanne, died in 2018 after 54 years of marriage.
His publisher said a "celebration of Juster’s life will take place at a later date." His family suggested a donation to Amherst, Massachusetts' Jones Library or the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in lieu of flowers.
"Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus" author Mo Willems mourned Juster, his "lunch partner," who Willems said "ran out of stories and passed peacefully last night."
"Norton’s greatest work was himself: a tapestry of delightful tales. Miss him," he added.
Contributing: The Associated Press
