‘Babar’ children’s book author Laurent de Brunhoff dies at 98

• Laurent de Brunhoff, author of the “Babar” collection, has died at the age of 98 in Key West, Florida.
• Laurent, son of Jean de Brunhoff, continued his father’s legacy, publishing quite a few books concerning the elephant king Babar.
• He was an completed painter and storyteller, creating works like “Babar at the Circus” and “Babar’s Yoga for Elephants.”

“Babar” author Laurent de Brunhoff, who revived his father’s well-liked image book collection about an elephant-king and presided over its rise to a worldwide, multimedia franchise, has died. He was 98.

De Brunhoff, a Paris native who moved to the U.S. within the Nineteen Eighties, died Friday at his house in Key West, Florida, after being in hospice care for 2 weeks, based on his widow, Phyllis Rose.

Just 12 years previous when his father, Jean de Brunhoff, died of tuberculosis, Laurent was an grownup when he drew upon his personal presents as a painter and storyteller and launched dozens of books concerning the elephant who reigns over Celesteville, amongst them “Babar at the Circus” and “Babar’s Yoga for Elephants.” He most popular utilizing fewer phrases than his father did, however his illustrations faithfully mimicked Jean’s light, understated model.

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“Together, father and son have woven a fictive world so seamless that it is nearly impossible to detect where one stopped and the other started,” author Ann S. Haskell wrote in The New York Times in 1981.

Babar author Laurent de Brunhoff poses for {a photograph} with Babar whereas celebrating 75 years of the book on April 21, 2006, at Mabel’s Fables in Toronto, Canada. De Brunhoff died on Friday at the age of 98. (Nathan Denette /The Canadian Press through AP)

The collection has bought tens of millions of copies worldwide and was tailored for a tv program and such animated options as “Babar: The Movie” and “Babar: King of the Elephants.” Fans ranged from Charles de Gaulle to Maurice Sendak, who as soon as wrote, “If he had come my way, how I would have welcomed that little elephant and smothered him with affection.”

De Brunhoff would say of his creation, “Babar, c’est moi” (“that’s me”), telling National Geographic in 2014 that “he’s been my whole life, for years and years, drawing the elephant.”

The books’ enchantment was removed from common. Some dad and mom shied from the passage within the debut, “The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant,” about Babar’s mom being shot and killed by hunters. Numerous critics known as the collection racist and colonialist, citing Babar’s training in Paris and its affect on his (presumed) Africa-based regime. In 1983, Chilean author Ariel Dorfman would name the books an “implicit history that justifies and rationalizes the motives behind an international situation in which some countries have everything and other countries almost nothing.”

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“Babar’s history,” Dorfman wrote, “is none other than the fulfillment of the dominant countries’ colonial dream.”

Adam Gopnik, a Paris-based correspondent for The New Yorker, defended “Babar,” writing in 2008 that it “is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination.”

De Brunhoff himself acknowledged discovering it “a little embarrassing to see Babar fighting with Black people in Africa. He especially regretted “Babar’s Picnic,” a 1949 publication that included crude caricatures of Blacks and American Indians, and asked his publisher to withdraw it.

De Brunhoff was the eldest of three sons born to Jean de Brunhoff and Cecile de Brunhoff, a painter. Babar was created when Cecile de Brunhoff, the namesake for the elephant’s kingdom and Babar’s wife, improvised a story for her kids.

“My mom began to inform us a narrative to distract us,” de Brunhoff told National Geographic in 2014. “We cherished it, and the subsequent day we ran to our father’s examine, which was within the nook of the backyard, to inform him about it. He was very amused and began to attract. And that was how the story of Babar was born. My mom known as him Bebe elephant (French for child). It was my father who modified the identify to Babar. But the primary pages of the primary book, with the elephant killed by a hunter and the escape to town, was her story.”

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The debut was released in 1931 through the family-run publisher Le Jardin Des Modes. Babar was immediately well received and Jean de Brunhoff completed four more Babar books before dying six years later, at age 37. Laurent’s uncle, Michael, helped publish two additional works, but no one else added to the series until after World War II, when Laurent, a painter by then, decided to bring it back.

“Gradually I started to really feel strongly {that a} Babar custom existed and that it should be perpetuated,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1952.

De Brunhoff was married twice, most recently to the critic and biographer Phyllis Rose, who wrote the text to many of the recent “Babar” publications, including the 2017 release billed as the finale, “Babar’s Guide to Paris.” He had two children, Anne and Antoine, but the author did not consciously write for young people.

“I by no means actually consider kids after I do my books,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2017. “Babar was my buddy and I invented tales with him, however not with youngsters in a nook of my thoughts. I write it for myself.”

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