AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS

Babar Author Laurent de Brunhoff Dies at 98

His father created the children’s book character of the elephant king, but he carried on and expanded the legacy.

Laurent de Brunhoff, the son of Babar creator Jean de Brunhoff, who carried on the literary legacy to author dozens of books about the regal elephant, has died at the age of 98. The Associated Press reports that de Brunhoff had been in hospice care before he died at his home in Key West. His father published the first book, The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, in 1931 and then wrote four more before he died of tuberculosis at age 37. Laurent was only 12 at the time, but when he was an adult painter, he decided the story of the elephant king “ought to be perpetuated.” Over the decades, he expanded the character’s reach to include a TV show and animated movies. “I never really think of children when I do my books,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2017, the year he published the finale of the series. “Babar was my friend and I invented stories with him, but not with kids in a corner of my mind. I write it for myself.”