Norton Juster obituary
Norton Juster, who has died aged 91, wrote The Phantom Tollbooth, which became a classic for children of all ages. It tells the story of a boy named Milo, who is both bored and boring. One day he finds a package in his bedroom, from which he assembles the flat-packed eponymous tollbooth, and through which he proceeds in his toy electric car.
He finds himself enmeshed in an ongoing conflict between Azaz the king of Dictionopolis and his brother the Mathemagician, ruler of Digitopolis. Tasked with rescuing the princesses Rhyme and Reason, Milo – accompanied by Tock, a watchdog who sports an alarm clock on his torso – begins an epic journey through a world filled with wordplay. Juster recalled his own childhood, in which he experienced synaesthesia. “I couldn’t do numbers if I didn’t see colours,” he explained, and in many ways his writing is about translating things differently from what may have been intended. As Milo learned: “So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.”
It was 1961, and The Phantom Tollbooth was like a child’s antidote to the drab 1950s; Milo could be a younger version of Holden Caulfield who discovers a world with which he can be involved. It might also be seen as an American version of Alice in Wonderland, though where Alice delves into Lewis Carroll’s deep Victorian unconscious, Juster’s Milo is a child having his consciousness unlocked. Juster always denied the influence; instead he said his book was inspired by his father’s incessant punning and his familiarity with Marx Brothers movies. “They were absolutely insane … and then you’d see them again and again and you realise they made all this good sense,” he said.
Juster was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Samuel, an architect, and Minnie (nee Silberman), were immigrants from Romania. Despite the punning, and his great love of literature, Norton was expected to follow his older brother into his father’s trade. He took a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and then studied city planning on a Fulbright grant at Liverpool University.
After his return to the US, he was drafted into the navy, spending three years as an engineer, and winding up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. After his discharge he eventually founded his own architectural firm, and won a Ford Foundation grant to write a book about urban perceptions. Procrastinating on that project, he began jotting down notes about Milo’s story.
It might have never been more, but one night, taking out the trash at his Brooklyn duplex, he met his upstairs neighbour, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer. “We started exchanging wisecracks,” Feiffer recalled. Juster showed Feiffer his story, and Feiffer began drawing illustrations. Juster began writing things more and more difficult to illustrate; Feiffer retaliated by drawing Juster into the story as The Whether Man.
But it was Feiffer’s wife, Judith, who took the book to Jason Epstein at Random House; Epstein was not a children’s editor, and he saw past the standard evaluations. “Everybody said this is not a children’s book,” Juster explained. “The wordplay, and the punning; they will never understand.” But of course children did, and what we didn’t understand at first, we understood the next time we read it, or the next. Sparked by a favourable review in the New York Times, the book became a bestseller.
Juster followed in 1963 with The Dot and the Line: A Romance In Lower Mathematics, about a line who discovers his own ability to illustrate quadratics and wins the dot away from the anarchic Squiggle. As Juster wrote: “To the vector go the spoils.” In 1965 it became an Oscar-winning short film, narrated by Robert Morley and co-directed by Maurice Noble and Chuck Jones, best known for Looney Tunes’ Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, who revel in their own wordplay. In 1970, Jones co-wrote and co-directed a full-length version of The Phantom Tollbooth, featuring the voices of Mel Blanc, June Foray, Daws Butler and Hans Conried. Its remarkable animation includes Milo’s drive through the Doldrums, where the Lethargians melt round his car like Dalì watches.
In 1964, Juster married Jeanne Ray, a graphic designer. He was also teaching at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, along with Earl Pope, his partner in their architectural firm. In 1970 they moved to Massachusetts, to join the founding faculty at Hampshire College, an experimental liberal arts college started by four institutions – the University of Massachusetts, and Amherst, Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges – based in the area. Juster would teach there for 20 years, though he could be very critical of the educational process. “It’s really the appearance ... and credentials of education they’re worried about. I think at birth they should give every child a PhD.”
His firm, which became Juster Pope Frazier, designed buildings on those campuses, as well as the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst; Carle illustrated Juster’s Otter Nonsense (1982). His other children’s books include Alberic the Wise (1965), illustrated by Domenico Gnoli, As Silly As Knees, As Busy As Bees (1989), for which the illustrator Chris Raschka won a Caldecott medal, and its sequel, Sourpuss and Sweetiepie (2008). In 2010, he and Feiffer reunited to produce a tale of bullying, The Odious Ogre.
But the legacy of The Phantom Tollbooth just grew. In 2011, Leonard Marcus edited an annotated version; in 2012 a documentary film, The Phantom Tollbooth: Beyond Expectations, appeared. In 2017, a stage musical debuted in Washington DC. Each generation had its eyes opened, and parents would again revel in the advice of the Terrible Trivium: “If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones that are so difficult.” Adults going back to it would discover new relevance. “Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best,” seems particularly apt for the social media age.
Jeanne died in 2018. Norton is survived by their daughter, Emily, and a granddaughter. Feiffer remembered Juster as his “oldest friend” and said that their “wisecracks never improved or diminished”.
• Norton Juster, writer and architect, born 2 June 1929; died 8 March 2021
