Meet the man who talks to the animals!
Here is Hugh Lofting’s classic tale of the English doctor who learns how to speak to his non-human patients – dogs, cats, rhinos and monkeys alike – as he travels from England to the jungles of Africa and back again. Doctor Dolittle’s entourage of animal friends, including Polynesia the parrot, Gub-Gub the pig, Jip the dog and Dab-Dab the duck, journey with the doctor and team up to help him out of one scrape after another.
This story – and the eight sequels it spawned – have delighted children of all ages for over a hundred years and the story has been adapted to the stage and screen, bringing the world of Doctor Dolittle and his friends to millions of people.
The story has been revised here to remove some offensive content and is now suitable to all readers. Please enjoy this revised edition of Hugh Lofting’s classic , ‘The Story of Doctor Dolittle’!
About the author
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.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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