NEW YORK – Norton Juster, a children’s author who brought fashion to the world of a multi-million-selling classic and thrilling punditry.Phantom tollboothHaving remained true to his wide eyes in such favorites as “The Dot and the Line” and “Stark Naked”, 91 has died.
Juster’s death was confirmed Tuesday by a spokesperson for Random House Children’s Books, who did not immediately provide details. Juster’s friend and fellow writer Moe Willems Tweeted on tuesday That juster ran “out of stories” and died “peacefully” the night before.
“Norton’s greatest work was himself: a tapestry of delightful stories,” Willems wrote.
The “Phantom Tollbooth”, published in 1961, followed the adventures of young Milo through the Kingdom of Wisdom, a land stretching from The Valley of Confusion to The Valley of Sound, the iconic Princess Raimi and the horror of Rezon and Het. Is inhabited by gorgons. And Malice.
The drawing was provided by his roommate at the time, Jules Fifer, who would later collaborate with Juster in “The Odysse Augre” in 2010. Eric Carle of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” portrayed Juster’s “Otter Nonsense”. In 1982.
As Juster wrote in the 1999 rebirth introduction to “The Phantom Tollbooth,” he first thought of the book when he was in his late 20s and was working at an architectural firm in New York City. He found himself surprised, the way a child can be, about how people relate to the world around them.
He received a grant for a book on urban planning and kept researching it for months before a boy’s “staggering” question – heard by a juster in a restaurant – changed his story and changed his life: “What’s the biggest number?”
“I started writing what I thought would be about a child’s confrontation with numbers and words and meanings and other strange concepts 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 sentences and wordplay that my father introduced me to when I was growing up.”
Another Justir Admiral, Maurice Sendak, would praise the book’s “exuberant and brilliant linguistic delight in linguistic acrobatics.” A 1970 film adaptation starred Butch Patrick of “The Munsters”, and “The Phantom Tollbooth” was later composed into a musical, with a song by Arnold Black and lyrics by Sheldon Hornick.
Justner’s 54-year-old wife, Jean, died in 2018. They had a daughter, Emily.
Juster, a native of New York City, was the architect’s son and brother and never completely changed from his family’s craft. While co-founder of the architectural company Juster Pope Associates in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, he continued to write books and his stories often combined his seemingly contrasting gifts to structure and unequality.
“Dot and the Line: A Romance in Mathematics” is a love triangle that Juster would have just imagined – between a straight and straight line, a dot dot and a swinging squiggle. (Animator Chuck Jones adapted it into an Oscar-winning short film).
“Stark Naked” finds an impartial hero wandering in a city of emotional heights, encountering such characters as intellectual Noel Lott and the school’s principal, Martin Nett.
Juster’s recent stories include “The Hello, Goodbye Window”, for which illustrator Chris Ruska received a Caldacott Medal, and the sequel “Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie.” A Project He Never Got: That Book on Urban Planning.
“The funny thing is that many of the things I was thinking about that book found their way into ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’,” he wrote in 1999. “Maybe someday when I’m trying, I’ll get it back. Avoid doing anything else.”
Leave a Reply