Hugh Lofting

First US edition of the second Doctor Dolittle book, which finds our animal-conversant hero on a number of ship-based adventures—winner of the second Newbery Medal ever presented.

• Hugh Lofting (English).
• New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1922.
• 364 pages.
• Illustrated with color frontispiece with captioned tissue guard, one color plate and 18 black-and-white illustrations.
• Bound in original grey boards with color pictorial paste-on, blue and yellow pictorial endpapers of Dr. Dolittle as king of the island.

Since his debut in this title, Doctor Dolittle has graced stage, screen, radio and even video games with his particular brand of kindly British bumbling and his fantastic ability to talk to animals. The original Dolittle tales frame the world beyond England's shores as curious, exotic and often dangerous, reflecting the colonialist ideals of contemporary white Britons; key plot points revolve around caricatured Black and Native American populations. They were immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and a new Dolittle book was published every year between 1922 and 1928. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle is substantially longer than the first Dolittle title, and was written with a slightly more mature audience in mind. It earned the second-ever Newbery Medal in 1923, and is still viewed as a childhood classic.