Hugh Lofting 
The Story of Doctor Dolittle [EPUB ebook] 

Hugh Lofting (1886-1947) was an author of Anglo-Irish ancestry born in Berkshire, England. Though he had an early love of writing, Lofting attempted to take a more practical path with his professional career, training as a civil engineer at MIT and London Polytechnic. Upon graduation, Lofting moved from one job to another, prospecting for gold in Canada, traveling to Cuba and West Africa and finally settling in America in 1912 where he married Flora Small, who bore him two children. At the beginning of World War One, he signed up to work for the British Ministry of Information in New York before enlisting in the British Army and serving in the Irish Guards. While stationed in France, Lofting saw combat – particularly at Flanders – and found the war to be alternatively tedious and horrifying. Rather than describe what was actually happening to him when he wrote letters home to his family, Lofting chose instead to create a fictional character – who he called ‚Doctor Dolittle‘ – to entertain his children. When he returned home from the war, he quickly abandoned any idea of returning to his life as an engineer and concentrated on his writing. At his family’s insistence, he turned his fictional, animal-loving doctor into the title character of his first book, The Story of Doctor Dolittle. It became an immediate hit and spawned no less than eight sequels. Tragedy seemed to follow Hugh Lofting in his personal life. Flora died in 1927 and after Lofting re-married, his second wife, Katherine Harrower, also passed away from influenza. He married a third and final time to Josephine Fricker and moved to California where she gave birth to a son, Christopher. Lofting himself passed away in 1947 after a two-year illness, leaving behind two posthumous Doctor Dolittle books to be published by his surviving family. Though he wrote many other books and short stories, Lofting’s true legacy is the Doctor Dolittle series, which has been adapted many times to the stage and screen and which is beloved by children around the world to this day.