Laurent de Brunhoff (born 30 August 1925) is a French author and illustrator, known primarily for continuing the Babar the Elephant series of children's books that was created by his father, Jean de Brunhoff. Early life Brunhoff was born in Paris. The children's classic Babar began as a bedtime story that Cécile de Brunhoff told her young sons, Laurent and Mathieu, in 1930, when they were five and four years old, respectively. They loved the story about the little elephant so much that they asked their father, who was an artist, to draw pictures for them of the elephant world their mother had described. He did and eventually created a book, L'Histoire de Babar: le petit éléphant (The Story of Babar), which was published by Jardin des Modes, a family-run publishing house. Jean de Brunhoff created five more Babar books and had one more son, Thierry, a concert pianist known particularly for his interpretation of Chopin, who became a Benedictine monk in 1974. Career After the war, Laurent, who inherited his father's artistic gift, trained at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under the painter Othon Friesz and began living as an artist in Montparnasse. But, wishing to maintain his tie to his father and the imaginative world of his childhood, he turned back to the character his father had drawn and taught himself to draw in his father's style. What Christine Nelson calls their "intergenerational artistic partnership" had begun even earlier, when Laurent was a teenager, and was asked to do the color for several pages that his father had left in black and white. His own first Babar book, Babar et ce coquin d’Arthur (Babar’s Cousin, That Rascal Arthur), was published in 1946 when Laurent was 21. He went on to publish over forty-five more Babar books, as well as creating children's books with characters of his own invention, Bonhomme and Serafina, among others. Personal life He was married to Marie-Claude Bloch in 1951 and together they had two children, Anne, born 1952, and Antoine, born 1954. They separated in 1985 and divorced in 1990. In 1985 de Brunhoff moved to the United States, living in Middletown, Connecticut, with writer and Wesleyan University professor Phyllis Rose. They married in 1990 and currently live in New York and Key West, Florida. Honors De Brunhoff, who holds both French and American citizenship, was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts