Norton Juster was born in New York State in 1929. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent a year in Liverpool on a Fulbright Scholarship. After spending three years in the US Navy, he practised architecture in New York and Massachusetts. His work includes The Dot and the Line, which was made into an animated film, and a musical adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth. He is married and lives in Massachusetts. He has one daughter and one granddaughter. The Phantom Tollbooth, his most famous book, won the George C. Stone Center for Children’s Books Award.