Hugh Lofting

Hugh Lofting (1886–1947) was an English author and illustrator, born in Maidenhead and trained as a civil engineer in London and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Serving with the Irish Guards on the Western Front, he wrote illustrated letters to his children about a doctor who could talk to animals rather than describe the war; these became The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), and he went on to write a dozen more Dolittle books, among them The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, which won the Newbery Medal in 1923. He settled in the United States after the war and died in California.