Norton Juster was born in New York State in 1929 and grew up (carefully) in Brooklyn, 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 practiced architecture in New York and Massachusetts before teaching architecture and planning. His work includes The Dot and the Line, which was made into an animated film, and a musical adaptation of The Phantom Tollbooth.
Jules Feiffer was born on January 26, 1929. While working as a cartoonist, his work appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, The Nation, and The New York Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning in The Village Voice in 1986. His other awards include a George Polk Award for his cartoons; an Obie Award for the play Little Murders; an Oscar for the anti-military short subject animation, Munro; and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Writers Guild of America and the National Cartoonist Society. He is currently focusing on writing and illustrating books for children and young adults including The Man in the Ceiling, A Room with a Zoo and Bark, George! He has been a… professor at the Yale School of Drama, Northwestern University, Dartmouth, and Stony Brook Southampton College. Feiffer has been honored with major retrospectives at the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and The School of Visual Arts.