(New York) The author of BabarLaurent de Brunhoff, who revived his father’s popular series of illustrated books about an elephant king and presided over its rise to a global multimedia franchise, has died at the age of 98.
Mr. de Brunhoff, who was originally from Paris and moved to the United States in the 1980s, died Friday at his home in Key West, Fla., after being treated for two weeks, according to his wife, Phyllis Rose.
Barely 12 years old when his father, Jean de Brunhoff, died of tuberculosis, Laurent was an adult when he drew on his own talents as a painter and storyteller to publish dozens of books on the elephant that reigns over Célesteville. , among which Babar at the circus And Babar’s Yoga for Elephants. He preferred to use fewer words than his father, but his illustrations faithfully imitate Jean’s gentle and sober style.
“Together, father and son weaved a fictional world so seamless that it is almost impossible to detect where one left off and the other began,” wrote author Ann S. Haskell in the New York Times in 1981.
The series has sold millions of copies worldwide and has been adapted for a television program and animated feature films such as Babar: the film And Babar: the king of elephants. Admirers ranged from Charles de Gaulle to Maurice Sendak.
Mr. de Brunhoff was the eldest of three sons born to Jean de Brunhoff and Cécile de Brunhoff, painter. Babar was created when Cécile de Brunhoff, the namesake of the Elephant Kingdom and wife of Babar, improvised a story for her children.
“My mother started telling us a story to distract us,” Mr. de Brunhoff told National Geographic in 2014.
“We loved it, and the next day we ran to our father’s office, which was in a corner of the garden, to tell him about it. He was very amused and started drawing. And so the story of Babar was born. My mother called him baby elephant. It was my father who changed the name to Babar. But the first pages of the first book, with the elephant killed by a hunter and the flight to the city, were his story. »
The first album was released in 1931 by the family publisher Le Jardin des Modes. Babar was immediately well received, and Jean de Brunhoff completed four more books on Babar before dying six years later, at the age of 37. Laurent’s uncle Michael helped publish two additional works, but no one else added to the series until World War II, when Laurent, then a painter, decided to continue it.
PHOTO HACHETTE, PARIS, PROVIDED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
The first album was released in 1931.
“Little by little, I began to feel strongly that a Babar tradition existed and that it must be perpetuated,” he wrote in the New York Timesin 1952.
Mr. de Brunhoff was married twice, most recently to the critic and biographer Phyllis Rose, who wrote the text for many of De Brunhoff’s recent publications. Babarincluding the 2017 version presented as the final, Babar’s guide to Paris. He had two children, Anne and Antoine, but the author did not consciously write for young people.
“I never really think about children when I make my books,” he explained to Wall Street Journal in 2017. Babar was my friend and I made up stories with him, but not with children in the back of my mind. I write it for myself. »