Hugh John Lofting (14 January 1886 – 26 September 1947) was an English-American writer, trained as a civil engineer, who created the classic children's literature character Doctor Dolittle.

[1] The fictional physician to talking animals, based in an English village, first appeared in illustrated letters to his children which Lofting sent from British Army trenches in the First World War.

[4][5] Lofting travelled widely as a civil engineer before enlisting in the Irish Guards regiment of the British Army in the First World War.

[9] Hugh Lofting's character, Doctor John Dolittle, an English physician from "Puddleby-on-the-Marsh" in the West Country, who could speak to animals, first saw light in illustrated letters written to his children from the trenches, when actual news, he later said, was too horrible or too dull.

The stories are set in early Victorian England in the 1820s–1840s – The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle gives a date of 1839.

[10] The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts Never Before Printed (1920) began the series and won a posthumous Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958.