Norton Juster

Norton Juster was born in Brooklyn in 1929, the son of an architect. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and did postgraduate work in urban planning in Liverpool on a Fulbright Fellowship, returning to New York to work in the profession for which he had trained. In 1960, on a Ford Foundation grant to write a book about urban perception, he found himself writing something else instead — the story of a bored boy named Milo who drives through a magical tollbooth into a kingdom where words and numbers are at war and a phantom tollbooth is the only passage between them. He had no intention of publishing it; he was avoiding the book he was supposed to be writing. His friend Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist, saw the manuscript and offered to illustrate it. Random House published The Phantom Tollbooth in 1961. Juster was thirty-two.

The novel operates on two levels simultaneously. On the surface it is a comic adventure: Milo travels through the Lands Beyond, meeting Tock the watchdog, Humbug the beetle, the Whether Man, the Spelling Bee, the Mathemagician, and the two kings Azaz the Unabridged and the Mathemagician (who are brothers and will not speak to each other because they cannot agree whether words or numbers are more important). He rescues the twin princesses Rhyme and Reason from the Castle in the Air and returns them to the kingdom. The plot is episodic and quest-structured in the manner of Alice in Wonderland, which it acknowledges.

Beneath the plot, the book is a sustained philosophical argument for paying attention. Every punning encounter — the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), the city of Reality (visible only when you look carefully), the Palace of Sound — is a demonstration that the world is interesting if you bother to look at it. Milo begins bored by everything and ends understanding that there is not enough time to experience everything that is worth experiencing. It is a rare children's book that is actually about something and argues for it formally rather than by assertion.

The book was not an immediate bestseller. It found its audience gradually, through school assignments, word of mouth, and the particular mechanism by which children's books propagate: adults who read it young give it to children who read it young, across generations. It has never gone out of print. Total sales exceed four million copies. An animated film adaptation appeared in 1970, largely faithful to the source; a live-action adaptation in 2022 drew less enthusiasm.

Juster returned to architecture and teaching after The Phantom Tollbooth. He wrote a handful of other children's books — The Dot and the Line (1963), Alberic the Wise (1965), The Hello, Goodbye Window (2005, illustrated by Chris Raschka, Caldecott Medal 2006) — but none with remotely the reach of the first. He taught architecture at Hampshire College for many years and continued practicing. He died in March 2021 at ninety-one. There is something fitting in the fact that his most important work was an accidental detour from a project he was supposed to be doing — a small argument for curiosity, written by someone who followed curiosity off the expected path.