The Story of Doctor Dolittle

Hugh Lofting

Lofting, born in January 1886 in Maidenhead, Berkshire, to Elizabeth Agnes (Gannon) and John Brien Lofting, was of English and Irish ancestry.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, 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, which later became the foundation of the successful Doctor Dolittle novels for children. Seriously wounded in the war, in 1919 Lofting moved with his family to Killingworth, Connecticut. He was married three times and had three children, one of whom, his son Christopher, became the executor of his literary estate.”