Biography

Arnold Stark Lobel (May 22, 1933 – December 4, 1987) was an American author of children's books, including the Frog and Toad series and Mouse Soup. He wrote and illustrated these picture books as well as Fables, a 1981 Caldecott Medal winner for best-illustrated U.S. picture book. Lobel also illustrated books by other writers, including Sam the Minuteman by Nathaniel Benchley published in 1969. Lobel was born in Los Angeles, California, to Lucille Stark and Joseph Lobel, and raised in Schenectady, New York, the hometown of his parents, by his German-Jewish grandparents. Lobel was frequently bullied in his childhood and often read picture books at his local library. He attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 1955, after he graduated, he married Anita Kempler, also a children's writer and illustrator whom he'd met while in art school. The two worked in the same studio and collaborated on several books together. They had two children, daughter Adrianne and son Adam, followed by three grandchildren.

After college, Lobel was unable to support himself as neither a children's book author nor illustrator and so he worked in advertising and trade magazines, which he openly disliked.In the early 1980s, he and Anita separated, and he moved to Greenwich Village. He died of cardiac arrest on December 4, 1987, at Doctors Hospital in New York, after suffering from AIDS for some time.