Benjamin Hoff

Benjamin Hoff grew up in a farmhouse in rural Sylvan, Oregon, which is now a suburb of Portland. As a child, he spent much of his time playing in the woods, which partially inspired his later interest in Taoism. He also spent plenty of time sick in bed, which led to his love for reading (and especially the Winnie-the-Pooh books). He inherited his father’s interest in Asian culture and studied Asian Art at the Evergreen State College in Washington. After his graduation in 1973, he worked a series of odd jobs in fields ranging from graphic design and music to antiques restoration and investigative reporting. In his spare time, he studied T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Japanese tree pruning, and Japanese tea ceremony. He wrote The Tao of Pooh and his earlier book about Taoism, The Way to Life, on nights and weekends while working as a tree pruner in the Portland Japanese Garden. Even though it received negative reviews at first, The Tao of Pooh eventually became a New York Times bestseller and helped popularize Taoism in the United States. Hoff followed it up with a sequel, The Te of Piglet, which also became a bestseller despite receiving unfavorable reviews. He also spent years researching Opal Whiteley, an Oregon writer and naturalist whose childhood diary turned her into a celebrity in the 1920s. Hoff’s book about Whiteley, The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow, helped build new interest in her life and legacy—as well as scrutiny into the authenticity of her writings. Hoff never became as popular as his books, which frustrated him throughout much of his life. He largely blamed his publisher and eventually got into a series of bitter, public arguments with them. In 2006, he wrote an essay called “Farewell to Authorship” and announced that he would no longer write books, and in 2018, he publicly took back the copyright for The Tao of Pooh from his publisher, preventing new editions from being printed.