Russell Conwell Hoban (February 4, 1925 – December 13, 2011) was an American writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children's books.
He lived in London from 1969 until his death.
Hoban was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, to Jewish immigrants from Ostrog (now in Ukraine). His father, Abram T. Hoban, was the advertising manager of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward and the director of The Drama Guild of the Labor Institute of the Workmen's Circle of Philadelphia. His father died when Russell was 11, and Russell was thereafter raised by his mother, Jeanette Dimmerman. He was named for Russell Conwell. After briefly attending Temple University, he enlisted in the Army at age 18 and served in the Philippines and Italy as a radio operator during World War II, earning a bronze star. During his military service he married Lillian Aberman, who later became a writer and illustrator herself. They had four children before divorcing in 1975.
After leaving military service, Hoban worked as an illustrator, painting several covers for TIME, Sports Illustrated, and The Saturday Evening Post, and as an advertising copywriter—occupations that several of his characters later shared—before he wrote and illustrated his first children's book, What Does It Do and How Does It Work?: Power Shovel, Dump Truck, and Other Heavy Machines, published by Harper in 1959. His 1962 Time cover portrait of Joan Baez now hangs in the US National Portrait Gallery.
The note "About the Artist" in the Macmillan Classics Edition of Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (second printing 1965), which Hoban illustrated, notes that he worked in advertising for Batten Barton Durstine & Osborn and that he later became the art director of J. Walter Thompson: "Heavy machinery later became subjects for his paintings, and this led him into the children's book field with the writing and illustrating of What Does It Do and How Does It Work? and The Atomic Submarine." That note also points out that in 1964, at the time the book's illustrations were copyrighted, Hoban was teaching drawing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, collaborating with his first wife on their fifth children's book, and living in Connecticut.
Hoban wrote exclusively for children for the next decade, and came to be known best for the series of seven picture books that feature Frances, a temperamental badger girl whose escapades were based partly on the experiences of his four children, Phoebe, Brom, and Julia and their friends.
Garth Williams depicted Frances as a badger in the first book, Bedtime for Frances (Harper, 1960), and Lillian Hoban retained that image as the illustrator of five sequels and a poetry collection, published from 1964 to 1972.
The U.S. national library reports holding about three dozen books written by Hoban and published from 1959 to 1972, including about two dozen illustrated by Lillian Hoban. One was illustrated by their son Brom Hoban: The Sea-thing Child (1972).
A dark philosophical tale for older children, The Mouse and His Child, appeared in 1967 and was Hoban's first full-length novel. It was later made into an animated film in 1977 by Murakami-Wolf-Swenson.
In 1969, the Hobans and their children travelled to London, intending to stay only a short time. The marriage dissolved and, while the rest of the family returned to the United States, Hoban remained in London for the rest of his life. All of Hoban's adult novels except for Riddley Walker, Pilgermann, Angelica Lost and Found (October 2010) and Fremder are set either wholly or partly in contemporary London.
In 1971, Hoban wrote a book employing concepts borrowed from "The Gift of the Magi", called Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, which further reached fans through a 1977 television special originally created for HBO by the Jim Henson Company. The book was illustrated by Lillian Hoban, whose drawn renditions of these characters were faithfully replicated by the Muppet creators. The story tells of a poor otter mother and son who do what they must to try to provide a special Christmas to one another, taking a route neither of them expected. His novel Turtle Diary (1975) was turned into a film version released in 1985, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.
Hoban had four children with his first wife, Lillian Aberman Hoban. Their daughter Phoebe Hoban is a journalist and biographer who specializes in art. The couple divorced in 1975, and in the same year he married Gundula Ahl, who worked in the fashionable London bookshop Truslove and Hanson. With Ahl he had three children, one of whom is the composer Wieland Hoban, to whom Riddley Walker is dedicated. Wieland Hoban set one of his father's texts to music in his piece Night Roads (1998–99).
Hoban's sister, Tana Hoban (1917–2006), was a photographer and children's author; he also had another sister, Freeda Hoban Ellis (1919–2002).
The last of Hoban's novels published during his lifetime was Angelica Lost and Found (October 2010), in which the hippogriff from Girolamo da Carpi's Ruggiero Saving Angelica breaks free from the 16th-century painting to search for Angelica in 21st-century San Francisco.
Hoban died on December 13, 2011. He had once ruefully observed that death would be a good career move: "People will say, 'Yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let's look at him again'."
Two new Hoban books were published posthumously by Walker Books in 2012: Soonchild, illustrated by Alexis Deacon, and Rosie's Magic Horse, illustrated by Quentin Blake. Deacon also provided artwork for a new version of Jim's Lion, published in 2014, which changed the format from a traditional picture book to a combination of text chapters and comics.
After his death, Hoban's papers were archived by writer Paul Cooper, and in 2016 the archive was acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
In May 1998, Dave Awl, a writer/performer with the experimental Chicago theatre troupe the Neo-Futurists, launched the first comprehensive Russell Hoban reference website, The Head of Orpheus, to which Russell Hoban regularly contributed news and information up until his death. In the fall of 1999, Awl founded a Hoban-themed online community called The Kraken (named after one of the characters in Hoban's 1987 novel The Medusa Frequency), which grew into an international network of Russell Hoban fans.