For its 50th anniversary, Adam Gopnik recalls the moral of Norton Juster's "The Phantom Tollbooth":
Juster was writing a comic hymn to the value of the liberal arts at a moment of their renaissance, buoyed as they were by the G.I. Bill and new cadres of students. … In "The Phantom Tollbooth," the real moral sin is knowing too much about one thing: the Mathemagician who obsesses over quantities; the unabridged Azaz who lives off his own words. Against those who worried that the liberal arts could not help us "win the future," Juster argued for the love of knowledge, and against narrow specialization. "The Phantom Tollbooth" was for learning, against usefulness.
The A.V. Club interviewed Juster not too long ago:
The Doldrums was a place I inhabited a great deal. I was a very introverted kid. In fact, I was quite intimidating to my parents, who never knew what I was thinking about or what mood I was in or how I was going to react to anything. In contrast, my brother, who was about 4.5 years older than me, he died a few years ago, was the family’s great hope. He was a really good-looking kid, he was the golden boy, and I was that strange kid. Consequently, one of the great advantages was, they left me alone. I inhabited a world which I invented, and in many ways, it was a fortress.
The Dish 