Norton Juster

Norton Juster was an American academic, architect, and writer, born in Brooklyn on June 2, 1929, to Jewish immigrant parents. His father, Samuel Juster, was born in Romania and became an architect through a correspondence course; his mother, Minnie Silberman, was of Polish Jewish descent. Architecture ran through the family: Juster’s brother, Howard, also became an architect. Juster studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1952, and then studied city planning at the University of Liverpool.

Juster came of age in the decades after World War II, when architecture, planning, publishing, and children’s culture were all changing in the United States. He enlisted in the Civil Engineer Corps of the United States Navy in 1954 and rose to lieutenant junior grade. During one tour, boredom pushed him toward writing and drawing a children’s story, though his commanding officer later reprimanded him for it. He also completed an unpublished satirical fairy tale called “The Passing of Irving.” Later, while posted at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he invented a non-existent military publication, the Naval News Service, as a way to request interviews, and he created the “Garibaldi Society,” complete with a logo, application, and rejection letter. Around this time, while taking out the trash, he met Jules Feiffer.

After his discharge from the Navy, Juster worked for a Manhattan architectural firm, taught part time, and took other jobs. He shared an apartment on State Street with Feiffer and another friend, and Feiffer became the illustrator of the book that made Juster best known: The Phantom Tollbooth, published in 1961. Two years later came The Dot and the Line, which became a standard book in classrooms around the country. Juster continued to write books for young readers, including Stark Naked: A Paranomastic Odyssey, Otter Nonsense, and As Silly as Knees, as Busy as Bees. He also wrote nonfiction for adults, including A Woman’s Place: Yesterday’s Women in Rural America, based on his personal experience of living on a farm in Massachusetts.

Even while he enjoyed writing, architecture remained the main center of Juster’s working life. In 1970, he became a professor of architecture and environmental design at Hampshire College, where he taught until his retirement in 1992. That same year, he co-founded the architectural firm Juster Pope Associates in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts; it later became Juster Pope Frazier after Jack Frazier joined in 1978. His training in architecture and planning, his Navy years, his jokes and formal mock documents, and his friendship with Feiffer all sit behind a body of work that often joined order with play.

Juster kept writing long after retiring from architecture. The Hello, Goodbye Window, published in 2005, won the Caldecott Medal for Chris Raschka’s illustrations in 2006, and its sequel, Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie, appeared in 2008. In 2010, he teamed again with Feiffer for The Odious Ogre. Both The Phantom Tollbooth and The Dot and the Line were adapted into films by animator Chuck Jones, and the latter received the 1966 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Juster died at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, on March 8, 2021, at 91, after complications of a stroke. His books remain easy to return to because they treat curiosity, rules, language, and wit as things children can take seriously and enjoy at the same time.