Norton Juster

Juster was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents. Like his father, he pursued a career in architecture. He joined the Navy in the mid-1950s as a young man. While in the Navy, Juster began doing small watercolors of fantastical creatures and writing in his downtime—though he was asked to stop. During these years, he wrote a children’s book that was never published. The Phantom Tollbooth came about when Juster received a grant to write a children’s book on urban planning. Instead, inspired by his own experiences as a kid and a conversation with a child at a restaurant about what the biggest number is, Juster wrote The Phantom Tollbooth. The book’s illustrator, Jules Feiffer, lived in the apartment below Juster’s. Feiffer’s girlfriend was the one to take Tollbooth to a publisher. Despite the fact that The Phantom Tollbooth has been considered a classic for decades (and the fact that Juster also wrote the wildly popular picture book The Dot and the Line, which was adapted into a 10-minute short by Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame), Juster mostly focused on his architecture career. He taught architecture at Hampshire College and also cofounded an architecture firm. Juster died in March of 2021 of complications related to a stroke.