How two talented unknowns (Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer) broke all the rules and created an instant classic—'The Phantom Tollbooth'

When The Phantom Tollbooth was first published in 1961, critics universally praised it as a modern-day American Alice in Wonderland. It’s easy to see why.

Like Lewis Carroll’s classic, The Phantom Tollbooth (Epstein & Carroll) is filled with zany wordplay, subversive games of logic, sophisticated line drawings, and humor that’s irresistible to readers of all ages. And like Alice, Milo is a bored innocent who unexpectedly finds himself on a magical journey to a strange land. Accompanied by his traveling companions, Tock the watchdog and the Humbug, the young boy struggles to make sense of the nonsensical adult world and sets off to rescue princesses Rhyme and Reason. But the same critics who recognized the book’s genius also wondered who its audience was—kids or grown-ups?

It was a question far from the minds of Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer when they started working on The Phantom Tollbooth a little over 50 years ago. At the time, neither had ever published a children’s book. Juster, an architect, and Feiffer, then a cartoonist at the Village Voice, were sharing an apartment in New York’s Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. Juster had recently received a Ford Foundation grant to create a kids’ book about how people experience cities, but he found the project exhausting. So to take his mind off it, he began writing The Phantom Tollbooth. When he shared pieces of the story with Feiffer, his roommate began to sketch its characters, and soon the two were bouncing ideas off each other—the book began to take shape.

Although they’ve worked together on only one title since then (The Odious Ogre, published last year by Michael di Capua Books, an imprint of Scholastic), Juster and Feiffer, now both 82, have remained friends, and as seen in the following conversation, they’re still on the same wavelength. To celebrate The Phantom Tollbooth’s golden anniversary, I asked them about its creation, their reaction to those early reviews, and why the story is as fresh and relevant today as it was back then.

If The Phantom Tollbooth had been created today, do you think it would be published?

Feiffer: I doubt it.

Juster: I have thought about that. One of the great advantages we had was that it was originally submitted to an editor who was not a children’s book editor. [Jason Epstein] liked it, and that was that. He had a certain amount of power, so he did it. I think it wouldn’t have gotten published then had it gone to a children’s book editor. To this day, it’s a miracle to me that the book actually got out. I thought it was just going to disappear or not get any reviews.

Feiffer: Even the good reviews, many of them, indicated that, well, this was a book for gifted children, for very bright children. And it turns out that in many ways it was almost the reverse. I mean bright children did read it, but in many cases, the most important responses I got were from kids who had some learning disability that they had to get past, and they did perfectly well with the story. So that whole idea that this was a book only for gifted kids was insane.

Juster: Even before the book was released, they were all telling me in the publishing house that it was not a children’s book at all, that the vocabulary was much too difficult and demanding, that the ideas were way beyond children, that they would never understand the wordplay and the punning. And to top it all off, of course, this was 1961; critics said that fantasy was bad for children because it disoriented them.

Juster: It was a truth that was held at the time because they had all these word lists and things. You had to be very careful about what you put in a children’s book, [because they believed] no child should ever run into anything that he didn’t already know about in a book. It was a terrible time for children’s books because that’s exactly the wrong way to go about it.

Juster: It was certainly a very different experience than what I’ve had with other books and other illustrators. You almost never come to a publisher with a manuscript and the illustrations. Publishers don’t like it, and editors don’t like it. Their idea of heaven is if the illustrator and the author never even get to meet, because then they can control the process.

Feiffer: It was really a collaboration. It was Norton writing his first book and having no idea what he was doing or where he was going. He would write a section or a couple of pages or even a chapter and want some feedback, and I would react and do some sketches. After a while, it became clear that I was going to illustrate the book—if there was a book. [Our collaboration] was a little casual, right from the beginning: nothing official, nothing planned. It just evolved, the way, I think, the book itself evolved.

Juster: Jules is quite right. I had no idea where it was going, because I wasn’t even writing it sequentially in many cases. I would do little bits and pieces, not knowing where they were going to go, or what I was going to come out with ultimately, and then things just began to develop.

Feiffer: Fifty years later, a thought occurs, which is, Milo in the book is entering a world that’s all new to him, all strange to him, that he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know the rules, and when he hears the rules, they make less sense than before he knew the rules. And that is perhaps the perfect metaphor for Norton having gotten out of the Navy, and entering this professional world where his brother is already a successful architect, and he’s following him in it. And Norton doesn’t really feel that any of this is truly the right fit, but he doesn’t know what is the right fit or where to go. And so, it may well be that Milo and his adventures are essentially a fantasy documentary for Norton’s state of mind at the time.

Juster: Yeah, I think that’s true. I was a second child. My brother was a wonderful student; he was a born leader; and he was a terrific athlete. All the expectations of the family were riding on him—and I was a schlumpy kid. I was very private and kept things inside myself. My parents were kind of intimidated by me in the sense that they never understood what I was doing or why. Or why I was reacting in certain ways. When I came out of the Navy, I did have that kind of lost feeling, and when I started writing The Phantom Tollbooth, it wasn’t a book, it was just a diversion, and it was somewhat autobiographical. As I wrote the book, I began to get more of a sense of what I was like as a kid, and consequently, where I was going. So it was kind of a cathartic experience for me. The first line, “There was a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself, not just sometimes, but always,” was exactly me.

Juster: The characters, as Jules did them, were exactly my images. When I saw them, they were right, and they would help me. Having trained architecturally, I find that any time I write it’s very necessary for me to be able to visualize the place, the people, what they’re wearing—a lot of things. It was easier for me to carry forward with those characters because of the drawings.

Feiffer: Norton and I had been friends by this time for at least two, maybe three years. So we were quite familiar with each other in terms of senses of humor and our attitudes and our politics and looking for girls. We were good friends. So it was quite logical that what I tended to draw was based on my familiarity with him and his own thought processes, his love for language, his love for words, his love for old books.

I chose the style of the illustration based primarily—entirely, really—on Norton. Often, in my company, he’d be haunting secondhand bookstores on Montague Street [in Brooklyn] and salivating over these old English children’s books with their wonderful illustrations.

Juster: That’s quite true.

Feiffer: You know, without him doing that, and without me being around to know that he did that based on a long acquaintance, this might have been very different.

Juster: The drawings were never just pictures—the drawings were the actual characters. That’s what made them so helpful and easy to work with. I didn’t just see a picture and say, “Now how do I relate to that?” I knew who that was.

Feiffer: Some of this goes back to our shared childhoods—for example, the character of the Humbug. We both grew up with old movies, so as soon as the Humbug enters the story, who else could I think of as the model but W. C. Fields? Particularly as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield. Whether Norton had that in mind or not, he grew up with the same movies and the same literature, and that had to be somewhere buried deep inside him.

Juster: And incidentally, that’s exactly the character I was thinking of, W. C. Fields. Both of us also grew up at a time when all those wonderful Marx Brothers films were being done. The same kind of insanity, which also ultimately ended up as being quite logical and existed through movie after movie after movie.

Juster: Well, I had it inflicted on me, really. My father was a great punster and loved wordplay. I’d walk into the room and he’d say, “Ah ha! I see you’re coming in early lately. You used to be behind before but now you’re first at last.” I had no idea what he was talking about. [Laughter.] Then he’d see that. He’d see it in my face. He’d get up, walk over, put his arm around me and say, “You’re a good kid, and I’d like to see you get ahead. You need one.” [Laughs.]

Every day this would happen. He was never a guffaw, ha-ha kind of a person—it was always these little things that were slipped in. When you’re a kid, your initial response to puns or wordplay is auwgghh. Then after a while, you begin to get them and you say to yourself, “I get that, and I can do that.” Then it starts to be a lot of fun, and of course, that’s exactly what the Marx Brothers did with language. They’d just turn it on its ear.

Juster: Exactly, yes. [Laughs.] The wonderful thing about using words—wordplay, puns—is that they absolutely subvert meaning, and they create their own meaning. They allow you to see or make you see things in a different way.

Juster: Yes. I’ll get a letter from a kid about eight or nine, who liked the book, and he’ll tell me who his favorite character was, and a few other things. And then maybe four or five years later, I’ll get another letter from him. It will start off by saying, “I wrote you when I was nine. I’m now 14, and I’m in high school,” and he’ll write about the book, and it’s a different book he’s writing about. I’ve had several readers who’ve written a third time when they’re out of high school and maybe in college. And again, it’s a different book. They understand things differently, and they begin to pick up on other things in the book.

One of the knocks on the book was that there’s a lot of the stuff in there that kids would not understand. I remember as a kid reading, and there were a lot of things in the books I read that I didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter because the story was good. You just ride right by them. Maybe you come back later, in a year or two. You read it again, and suddenly you understand these things.

Feiffer: There was another element in all of this back then, and even more so now. That is, most of what people know is based on their own tight little world, and what they think is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable. And then a book breaks through, as it did with Maurice [Sendak’s] Where the Wild Things Are or with Norton and The Phantom Tollbooth, and rather than learn from that, they think these books are just exceptions. If anything, it reinforces their prejudices.

But one of the wonderful things about children’s books is that a kid can read something and find in the book a friendship, an ally, something he doesn’t have at home. He can create a relationship with the text that is profound, in a way that is different from any other experience he has. And then he can look back on this book and others, as one of the big changing moments in his life. If you turned all editorial judgment over to the people in charge, those moments would never ever happen.

Juster: A lot of the letters I get that come from kids who are a little bit older will talk about things that they think they understand that I put in the book. And quite often, they’re things that I had no idea were in the book. But they have read it, and it has registered in a certain way with them. And that’s exactly the way it should be.

Juster: Yes. I think a lot of these basic things don’t change. They take different forms, but they don’t change. The basic issues still remain. And as I said, there are a lot of things in that book that I’ve been given credit for which I had no conscious idea I was suggesting—and I’m perfectly willing to take credit for them all. [Laughter.]