Author
Hugh Lofting
1886-1947
Hugh Lofting was an English-American writer who created Doctor Dolittle, the doctor who can talk to animals, in illustrated letters to his children from the First World War.
Born Hugh John Lofting.
Hugh John Lofting was born on 14 January 1886 in Maidenhead, Berkshire, to Elizabeth Agnes Gannon and John Brien Lofting, and was of English and Irish ancestry. His eldest brother, Hilary, later became a novelist in Australia. Lofting was educated at Mount St Mary's College in Spinkhill, Derbyshire, and from 1905 to 1906 studied civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He travelled widely as a civil engineer before joining the Irish Guards in the First World War. Not wishing to write to his children about the brutal war, he sent them illustrated letters about a doctor who could speak to animals instead, because actual news, he later said, was too horrible or too dull. Seriously wounded, he emigrated with his family to Killingworth, Connecticut, in 1919, and his first book appeared after he had settled in the United States.
That book was The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), about an English physician in the fictional West Country town of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, with the stories set in the 1820s-1840s. Its first sequel, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922), won a Newbery Medal, and eight more novels by Lofting followed. He also wrote picture books for younger children, poems for children and one work for adults, Victory for the Slain (1942), a long poem about the futility of war.
Lofting was married three times and had three children. He died on 26 September 1947 at his home in Topanga, California, and was buried in Killingworth.
Sources: wikipedia.org
