Norton Juster, architect who wrote the celebrated children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth – obituary The Phantom Tollbooth was published in 1961 and has remained in print ever since, selling millions of copies Norton Juster Credit: Bill Greene/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Norton Juster, who has died aged 91, was an American author whose children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth was widely considered in the same breath as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. An architect by training, Juster dreamt up the absurdist world of the book as a way to relieve the tedium of working on another book that he had been commissioned to produce. The Phantom Tollbooth’s protagonist, Milo, is a bored and dispirited little boy with no interest in solving the “useless problems” put to him by schoolteachers.