Hugh John Lofting was born in 1886 in Maidenhead, England, and trained as a civil engineer at MIT and the London Polytechnic. He worked on railway and mining projects in West Africa, Cuba, and Canada before settling into a quieter life in the United States, where he had married in 1912. The Great War changed everything. Lofting was commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1916 and served on the Western Front, where the daily reality of trench warfare convinced him he could not write home to his small children about what he was actually seeing.
Instead he invented Doctor Dolittle. The letters Lofting sent to his daughter Elizabeth and son Colin contained illustrated stories about an absent-minded English country doctor who learns the languages of animals and treats them instead of human patients. After the war he reworked the letters into a book. The Story of Doctor Dolittle came out in 1920 and was immediately popular. The second book, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, won the Newbery Medal in 1923, and Lofting found himself contractually committed to a series he had not initially intended.
He wrote twelve Dolittle books in total, growing more and more ambivalent about the character. His later books, especially Doctor Dolittle in the Moon, were stranger and more philosophical than the early adventure stories. He lost his second wife to influenza in 1927 and married for a third time later. His health declined through the 1930s and 1940s. He died in 1947 in California. Two posthumous Dolittle books were assembled from his drafts and published by his widow. The original books have been republished repeatedly, sometimes with the more dated colonial-era passages edited out, and the doctor's voice has continued to find new readers across a hundred years.
