Hugh Lofting

Hugh John Lofting (14 January 1886 – 26 September 1947) was an English-American writer, trained as a civil engineer, who created the classic children's literature character Doctor Dolittle. The fictional physician talking to animals, based in an English village, first appeared in illustrated letters to his children which Lofting sent from British Army trenches in the First World War. Lofting settled in the United States soon after the war and before his first book was published.

Personal life Lofting was born on 14 January 1886 in Maidenhead, Berkshire, to Elizabeth Agnes (Gannon) and John Brien Lofting, His eldest brother, Hilary Lofting, later became a novelist in Australia, having emigrated there in 1915.

Lofting was educated at Mount St Mary's College in Spinkhill, Derbyshire. From 1905 to 1906 he studied civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lofting travelled widely as a civil engineer before enlisting in the Irish Guards regiment of the British Army in the First World War. Not wishing to write to his children about the brutal war, he wrote imaginative letters that later became the foundations for his Doctor Dolittle novels for children. Seriously wounded in the war, he emigrated with his family to Killingworth, Connecticut, in 1919. He was married three times and had three children, one of whom, his son Christopher, became the executor of his literary estate.

Lofting died on 26 September 1947 at his home in Topanga, California from cirrhosis of the liver. He is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Killingworth, Middlesex County, Connecticut.

Doctor Dolittle

Hugh Lofting's character Doctor John Dolittle, an English physician who lives in the fictional town of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in the West Country and can speak to animals, first saw light in illustrated letters written to his children from the trenches, when actual news, he later said, was too horrible or too dull. The stories are set in England in the 1820s–1840s – The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle gives a date of 1839.

Doctor Dolittle

The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920) The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922) Doctor Dolittle's Post Office (1923) Doctor Dolittle's Circus (1924) Doctor Dolittle's Zoo (1925) Doctor Dolittle's Caravan (1926) Doctor Dolittle's Garden (1927) Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1928) Gub Gub's Book: An Encyclopedia of Food (1932) Doctor Dolittle's Return (1933) Doctor Dolittle's Birthday Book (1936) Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake (1948) Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary (1950) Doctor Dolittle's Puddleby Adventures (1952)

Other

The Story of Mrs Tubbs (1923) Porridge Poetry (1924) Noisy Nora (1929) The Twilight of Magic (1930) Tommy, Tilly, and Mrs. Tubbs (1936) Victory for the Slain (1942)