# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What was Dr. Seuss's education?

What made Dr. Seuss famous?

What is Dr. Seuss most famous for?

Which Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published?

Dr. Seuss, pseudonym of Theodor Seuss Geisel, (born March 2, 1904, Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.-died September 24, 1991, La Jolla, California), American writer and illustrator of immensely popular children's books, which were noted for their nonsense words, playful rhymes, and unusual creatures.

Early career and first Dr. Seuss books

After graduating from Dartmouth College (B.A., 1925), Geisel did postgraduate studies at Lincoln College, Oxford, and at the Sorbonne. He subsequently began working for Life, Vanity Fair, and other publications as an illustrator and humorist. In addition, he found success in advertising, providing illustrations for a number of campaigns. Geisel was especially noted for his work on ads for Flit insect repellent. Some of his characters later appeared in his children's works.

After illustrating a series of humour books, Geisel decided to write a children's book, which was reportedly rejected by nearly 30 publishers. After his chance meeting with a friend who was an editor at Vanguard Press, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was finally released in 1937. The work centres on a young boy who transforms his ordinary walk home from school into a fantastical story. Later, however, he describes only the facts of his walk to his father, who frowns on the boy's imaginative nature. Geisel used the pen name Dr. Seuss, planning to publish novels under his surname; the Dr. was a tongue-in-cheek reference to his uncompleted doctorate degree. However, his first book for adults, The Seven Lady Godivas (1939), fared poorly, and thereafter he focused on children's books, which he preferred. According to Geisel, "Adults are obsolete children, and the hell with them."

After publishing several more children's works, Geisel released Horton Hatches the Egg in 1940. With it, he introduced the features that would come to define his books: a unique brand of humour, playful use of words, and outlandish characters. It centres on an elephant who is duped into sitting on the egg of a bird who goes on vacation. Despite various hardships, Horton refuses to leave: "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one hundred percent!" In the end, he is rewarded when the egg hatches, and a creature with bird wings and an elephant's head emerges.

World War II and documentaries

During World War II Geisel's focus shifted to politics. In the early 1940s he was an editorial cartoonist at PM magazine in New York City. He then served (1942-46) in the U.S. Army, where he was assigned to the documentary division. In 1945 he wrote Your Job in Germany, which was directed by Frank Capra; it was later remade as the Academy Award-winning Hitler Lives (1945), though Geisel was not credited. After his service ended, he continued to make films. With his first wife, Helen Palmer Geisel, he wrote the Oscar-winning documentary feature Design for Death (1947). His animated cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950) also won an Academy Award.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dr. Seuss | Biography, Books, Characters, Movies, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dr. Seuss, pseudonym of Theodor Seuss Geisel, (born March 2, 1904, Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.-died September 24, 1991, La Jolla, California), American writer and illustrator of immensely popular children's books, which were noted for their nonsense words, playful rhymes, and unusual creatures.

# data[].attributes.body
EBSCO Article - Includes early life information!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
EBSCO Information Services, Inc. | www.ebsco.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
American artist and educator

Born: March 2, 1904

Birthplace: Springfield, Massachusetts

Died: September 24, 1991

Place of death: La Jolla, California

Through his unusual drawings and unique use of language, Geisel introduced generations of children to the joys of reading and the wonders of the imagination.
Early Life

Dr. Seuss (sews) was born Theodor Seuss Geisel, the second child and only son of German American immigrants. Geisel enjoyed a warm family life and was especially close to his older sister, Margaretha. His earliest memories of home were of a stuffed dog his mother gave him. He treasured it through life as a symbol of his loving childhood and kept it close to his drawing board.

While no record of Geisel's elementary school education exists, he was quite interested in outdoor activities. He was also fascinated by the Springfield Zoo, where he would go with his father on Sundays and holidays. Geisel often brought along a pad and pencil, although his pictures seldom resembled real animals. Just as his father encouraged his drawing, Geisel's mother fostered his interest in reading. He especially liked fanciful books, which taught him that writing could be fun.

In high school, while Geisel's friends and family liked his drawing, his art teacher did not. Geisel once turned a painting upside down to see how it looked. His art teacher thought Geisel was not taking art seriously and advised him to try a career in another field.

Influenced by his favorite teacher, a Dartmouth alumnus, Geisel chose Dartmouth for his college education in 1921. By the end of his junior year, Geisel was editing the school's humor magazine, but after a prank, he was removed from the paper. However, he continued to edit, write, and draw cartoons under the name "Dr. Seuss." After Dartmouth, unsure of what he wanted to do, Geisel attended Oxford University in England in the autumn of 1925. His Oxford notebooks were full of strange and fabulous animals. An American woman at Oxford named Helen Palmer suggested that Geisel stop studying literature and work on his drawing.

After he returned from Europe in 1927, Geisel tried to find work as a cartoonist in New York. After several months of rejections, Geisel found a job as a staff writer and cartoonist for Judge magazine. This allowed him to marry Palmer on November 27, 1927, and she became his collaborator and editor. One of Geisel's cartoons for Judge changed his life. An advertising executive's wife saw the cartoon and pushed her husband to hire Geisel. By 1931, Geisel was earning a good income that allowed him and Helen to live quite well.

Life's Work

Despite his prosperity, Geisel found himself frustrated. In 1932, he illustrated and wrote a children's book containing his whimsical animals. However, no one wanted to publish the book. Nonetheless, Geisel refused to give up. In 1936, while on board a ship, he began writing to take his mind off a storm. The rhythm of the engines gradually caught his imagination, and he began to write phrases to match the beat. The one that he liked the most was "and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street," which became the title of a story of a boy's imagination and how it turned the ordinary into the extraordinary. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), Geisel's first children's book, sold well and was critically well received. It displayed a hallmark of all later Dr. Seuss books: the careful placement of words and pictures on the page to encourage children to read further in the book.

By the early 1940's, World War II was raging across the globe. Geisel decided to use his art to help. He joined the Army in 1943 and moved to Hollywood, California, to make war films. Geisel advanced to the rank of lieutenant colonel and also won Academy Awards in 1946 and 1947 for his war documentaries. Significantly, it was in Hollywood that he learned to edit a story to move the plot along, and this would later help his children's books.

After the war, Geisel settled in California. In 1951 he had the chance to combine children's stories with films, and so he wrote the script for a cartoon, Gerald McBoing Boing, which won him another Academy Award. However, it also led to one of Geisel's greatest failures, the live-action film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. While it was a critical failure when it opened in 1953, in later years it did develop a cult following.

The Cat in the Hat , the book for which Dr. Seuss is probably most well known, was born out of a bet in 1957. A friend of Geisel who published children's books complained that reading primers were bland and boring. He presented Geisel with a list of 225 words appropriate for young readers and challenged him to write a better book. It took nine months of hard work, but Geisel did it. Published both as a textbook and as a commercial book, The Cat in the Hat was an immediate hit with adults and children alike. The Cat in the Hat taught children that books were not simply colorful objects and that there was a relationship between pictures and words. While the figure of the anarchic cat sparked some criticism, its underlying message was clear: If your world is unsatisfying, change it.

The success of The Cat in the Hat led Geisel's publisher to develop a special children's line that focused on fun reading primers. Geisel and his wife were both editors, writers, and executives of the new publishing venture. Geisel had thought about a children's Christmas book for years, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! appeared in 1958. It was an indictment of materialism in American culture. The book was adapted for television in 1966 by the animator Chuck Jones. While critics gave the animated version bad reviews, it was a popular success that became a staple of children's holiday television specials.

Geisel's success continued to mount during the 1960's, but it was marred when his most stringent critic and most ardent supporter, his wife, Helen, died on October 23, 1967. One year later, Geisel married a friend of the family, Audrey Stone Diamond.

In the 1970's, Geisel turned his attention to environmental problems with The Lorax (1971), an explicitly political book that grew out of Geisel's frustration with the destruction of the global environment. In this polemic, Geisel crafted some of his most impassioned and Seussian language to date. Before The Lorax, Geisel had written many editorial cartoons for various causes. Although The Sneetches, in which Geisel addressed themes of racism and discrimination, appeared in 1961, The Lorax was the first of his books to contain an overt political message.

Despite increasing health problems, Geisel continued to develop his publishing and editorial interests throughout the 1970's. He published children's books under the name Theo LeSieg (Geisel spelled backward) when he wrote but did not illustrate the book.

By the 1980's, Geisel had other political concerns that he expressed through his art and verse. In 1984, he published The Butter Battle Book , which expressed his fears about the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, and the possibilities of nuclear war. While some deplored the subject of nuclear war for children's books, others praised Geisel for handling a fact of life in the 1980's in a manner accessible to young people. The Butter Battle Book lacked a clearly defined ending because Geisel felt that in real life, the ending had not been written. The Butter Battle Book quickly climbed to the top of not only juvenile best-seller lists but also the fiction list of The New York Times Book Review.

In April, 1984, Geisel won a Pulitzer Prize in recognition of almost one-half century of contributions to children's literature. One Pulitzer judge reported that Geisel's nomination met with virtual unanimity. Geisel had at least one more new book left in him. In 1986, he published You're Only Old Once: A Book for Obsolete Children . In this book, he was more a memoirist or essayist than a storyteller, for it contained his reflections on aging and the inevitability of decline. It was also a critique of modern medicine and its often costly, invasive, and sometimes pointless treatments. The master of children's literature had written a book that was as much for parents and grandparents as for children. In 1990, Geisel penned what he regarded as his final book. Entitled Oh, the Places You'll Go! , its theme was hope; in it, Geisel coined new words and deliberately inserted references to his previous books, including memorable creations such as Horton.

A seven-year-old Dr. Seuss fan once told an interviewer, "When Dr. Seuss dies, that's going to be some awful day." That day arrived on September 24, 1991. Theodor Seuss Geisel, the beloved Dr. Seuss, died at age eighty-seven at his home in La Jolla, California.

Almost two decades after Geisel's death, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced they would be ceasing sales several Dr. Suess books that contained racist and insensitive imagery. After months of discussion, the estate ceased the production and sales of six Dr. Seuss books: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot's Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat's Quizzer.

Significance

By the time Geisel died, he had written forty-eight books that, when combined, had sold more than 200 million copies. Through these books, he spearheaded a movement to make children's books interesting and entertaining, and to replace the bland treacle of earlier reading primers. Geisel consistently challenged the conventions of children's literature because he refused to patronize children. He brought messages to challenge readers of all ages to take action to solve dire threats to life. His books also encouraged children to notice and celebrate the differences between people and to take special notice of the differences in themselves.

Geisel was not a person who sought celebrity, but by the time of his death, celebrity had found him. He was loved by three generations of children and adults, and continues to be a source of wonder and inspiration to young readers. Geisel taught those generations that the world was limited only by the imagination. He took his readers to imaginary and faraway lands, and guided them with humor and gentleness to consider the world from all angles.

Bibliography

Cohen, Charles D. The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel. New York: Random House, 2004. A lavishly illustrated biography, tracing Geisel's life and the creation of his art and writing.

Fensch, Thomas. The Man Who Was Dr. Seuss: The Life and Work of Theodor Geisel. Woodlands, Tex.: New Century Books, 2000. A straightforward literary biography, chronicling the major events in Geisel's life and the development of his characters and books.

Geisel, Theodor. The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss. Introduction by Maurice Sendak. New York: Random House, 1995. Geisel often painted in oil and watercolor, but only for his own enjoyment. This posthumous collection reveals another side of a complicated person.

MacDonald, Ruth L. Dr. Seuss. Boston: Twayne, 1988. A scholarly analysis of the sort that Geisel had no use for, this book contains in-depth criticism of his work, some biographical information, a chronology, and minor factual errors.

Marschall, Richard, ed. The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the Dough: Early Writings and Cartoons By Dr. Seuss. New York: Random House, 1987. This book contains much of the hard-to-find early work of Geisel, particularly his cartoons and satirical essays from Judge. While all the Seussian elements are present, these are not children's cartoons.

Morgan, Judith, and Neil Morgan. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel, A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. This definitive Geisel biography is based on extensive interviews and archival and manuscript material. Although it is scholarly, it is accessible and fun to read.

Nel, Philip. Dr. Seuss: An American Icon. New York: Continuum, 2004. Focuses on Geisel's writing and art to explain how his works entered and were received in American culture.

Pratt, Mark. "6 Dr. Seuss Books Won't Be Published for Racists Images." AP News, 2 Mar. 2021, apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed18335c03319d72f443594c174513. Accessed 28 Apr. 2021. This article discusses the Dr. Suess Enterprises decision to cease the sale of several Dr. Seuss books that contain racist imagery.

Preciado, Kathleen, and Letitia O'Connor. Dr. Seuss from Then to Now: A Catalogue of the Retrospective Exhibition Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art. New York: Random House, 1986. This book contains many cartoons not included in other works and discusses Geisel's little-known The Seven Lady Godivas (1939). While not analytical, it provides a good overview of his work from 1937 to 1986.

Weidt, Maryann N. Oh, the Places He Went: A Story About Dr. Seuss. Minneapolis, Minn.: Carolrhoda Books, 1994. Although primarily aimed at younger readers, this short and highly accessible biography contains a comprehensive overview of Geisel's life and work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dr. Seuss, born Theodor Seuss Geisel in 1904 to German American immigrants, is a renowned author and illustrator celebrated for his whimsical children's books. He grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, where a close-knit family environment nurtured his interests in art and literature.

# data[].attributes.body
Dr. Seuss Website ; contains lots of valuable information for each section

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Art of Dr. Seuss Collection, Published by Chaseart Companies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, began his career as a little-known editorial cartoonist in the 1920s. His intriguing perspective and fresh concepts ignited his career, and his work evolved quickly to deft illustrations, modeled sculpture, and sophisticated oil paintings of elaborate imagination. His artistic vision emerged as the golden thread that linked every facet of his varied career, and his artwork became the platform from which he delivered numerous children's books, hundreds of advertisements, and countless editorials filled with wonderfully inventive animals, characters, and humor.

Geisel single-handedly forged a new genre of art that falls somewhere between the surrealist movement of the early 20th century and the inspired nonsense of a child's classroom doodles. The Art of Dr. Seuss project offers a rare glimpse into the artistic life of this celebrated American icon and chronicles almost seven decades of work that, in every respect is uniquely, stylistically, and endearingly Seussian.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Art of Dr. Seuss Collection, Published by Chaseart Companies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The artistic legacy of Theodor Seuss Geisel Discover

# data[].attributes.body
This website on this tab contains all of his artwork and information about them

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The Art of Dr. Seuss Collection, Published by Chaseart Companies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Like Norman Rockwell, Dr. Seuss created every rough sketch, preliminary drawing, final line drawing, and finished work for each page of every project he illustrated.

Despite the technical and budgetary limitations of color printing during the early and mid-twentieth century, Dr. Seuss was meticulous about color selection. He created specially numbered color charts and intricate color callouts to precisely accomplish his vision for each book. Saturated reds and blues, for example, were carefully chosen for The Cat in the Hat to attract and maintain the visual attention of a six-year-old audience.

Even before Dr. Seuss's book career took off, sharp draftsman skills were evident in his editorial works, advertisements, and cartoons. His ability to move a storyline ahead via illustrations filled with tension, movement, and color became a hallmark of his children's literature, and the surreal images that unfolded over six decades became the catalyst for a humorous and inspired learning experience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Illustration Art - The Art of Dr. Seuss Collection, Published by Chaseart Companies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Like Norman Rockwell, Dr. Seuss created every rough sketch, preliminary drawing, final line drawing, and finished work for each page of every project he illustrated. Despite the technical and budgetary limitations of color printing during the early and mid-twentieth century, Dr. Seuss was meticulous about color selection.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known under his pseudonym "Dr. Seuss," was "probably the best-loved and certainly the best-selling children's book writer of all time," wrote Robert Wilson of the New York Times Book Review. Geisel entertained several generations of young readers with his zany nonsense books. Speaking to Herbert Kupferberg of Parade, Geisel once claimed: "Old men on crutches tell me, 'I've been brought up on your books.'" His "rhythmic verse rivals Lewis Carroll's," stated Stefan Kanfer in Time, "and his freestyle drawing recalls the loony sketches of Edward Lear." Because of his work in publishing books for young readers and for the many innovative children's classics he wrote himself, during the second half of the twentieth century Geisel "had a tremendous impact on children's reading habits and the way reading is taught and approached in the school system," declared Miles Corwin of the Los Angeles Times.

Geisel had originally intended to become a professor of English, but soon "became frustrated when he was shunted into a particularly insignificant field of research," reported Myra Kibler in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. After leaving graduate school in 1926, Geisel worked for a number of years as a freelance magazine cartoonist, selling cartoons and humorous prose pieces to the major humor magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Many of these works are collected in The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough. One of Geisel's cartoons-about "Flit," a spray-can pesticide-attracted the attention of the Standard Oil Company, manufacturers of the product. In 1928 they hired Geisel to draw their magazine advertising art and, for the next fifteen years, he created grotesque, enormous insects to illustrate the famous slogan "Quick, Henry! The Flit!" He also created monsters for the motor oil division of Standard Oil, including the Moto-Raspus, the Moto-Munchus, and the Karbo-Nockus, that, said Kibler, are precursors of his later fantastic creatures.

It was quite by chance that Geisel began writing for children. Returning from Europe by boat in 1936, he amused himself by putting together a nonsense poem to the rhythm of the ship's engine. Later he drew pictures to illustrate the rhyme and in 1937 published the result as And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, his first children's book. Set in Geisel's home town of Springfield, Massachusetts, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is the story of a boy whose imagination transforms a simple horse-drawn wagon into a marvelous and exotic parade of strange creatures and vehicles. Many critics regard it as Geisel's best work.

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, along with The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Horton Hatches the Egg, and McElligot's Pool, introduces many of the elements for which Geisel became famous. Mulberry Street features rollicking anapestic tetrameter verse that complements the author's boisterous illustrations. Jonathan Cott, writing in Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children's Literature, declared that "the unflagging momentum, feeling of breathlessness, and swiftness of pace, all together [act] as the motor for Dr. Seuss's pullulating image machine." Whimsical fantasy characterizes The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, while Horton Hatches the Egg introduces an element of morality and McElligot's Pool marks the first appearance of the fantasy animal characters for which Geisel became famous.

The outbreak of World War II forced Geisel to give up writing for children temporarily and to devote his talents to the war effort. Working with the Information and Education Division of the U.S. Army, he made documentary films for American soldiers. One of these army films- Hitler Lives-won an Academy Award, a feat Geisel repeated with his documentary about the Japanese war effort, Design for Death, and the UPA cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing, about a little boy who can only speak in sound effects. The screenplay for the film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, which Geisel wrote with Allen Scott, achieved cult status during the 1960s among music students on college campuses. Later, Geisel adapted several of his books into animated television specials, the most famous of which- How the Grinch Stole Christmas-has become a holiday favorite.

The success of his early books confirmed Geisel as an important new children's writer. However, it was The Cat in the Hat that solidified his reputation and revolutionized the world of children's book publishing. By using a limited number of different words, all simple enough for very young children to read, and through its wildly iconoclastic plot-when two children are alone at home on a rainy day, the Cat in the Hat arrives to entertain them, wrecking their house in the process- The Cat in the Hat provided an attractive alternative to the simplistic "Dick and Jane" primers then in use in American schools, and critics applauded its appearance. Helen Adams Masten in the Saturday Review marveled at the way Geisel, using "only 223 different words, . . . has created a story in rhyme which presents an impelling incentive to read." The enthusiastic reception of The Cat in the Hat led Geisel to found Beginner Books, a publishing company specializing in easy-to-read books for children. In 1960 Random House acquired the company and made Geisel president of the Beginner Books division.

Geisel and Beginner Books created many modern classics for children, from Green Eggs and Ham, about the need to try new experiences, and Fox in Socks, a series of increasingly boisterous tongue-twisters, to The Lorax, about environmental preservation, and The Butter Battle Book, a fable based on the nuclear arms race. In 1986, at the age of eighty-two, Geisel produced his most uncharacteristic book, You're Only Old Once, a work geared for the "obsolete children" of the world. The story follows an elderly gentleman's examination at "The Golden Age Clinic on Century Square," where he has gone for "Spleen Readjustment and Muffler Repair." The gentleman, who is never named, is subjected to a number of seemingly pointless tests by merciless physicians and grim nurses, ranging from a diet machine that rejects any appealing foods to an enormous eye chart that asks, "Have you any idea how much these tests are costing you?" Finally, the patient is dismissed, the doctors telling him: "You're in pretty good shape / For the shape that you're in!"

In its cheerful conclusion You're Only Old Once is typically Geisel. "The other ending is unacceptable," the author confided to New York Times Book Review contributor David W. Dunlap. In other ways, however, the book is very different in that it is much more autobiographical than any of his other stories. Robin Marantz Henig, writing in the Washington Post Book World, called You're Only Old Once "lighthearted, silly, but with an undertone of complaint. Being old is sometimes tough, isn't it . . . Seuss seems to be saying." Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Jack Smith declared that in the book Geisel "reveals himself as human and old, and full of aches and pains and alarming symptoms, and frightened of the world of geriatric medicine, with its endless tests, overzealous doctors, intimidating nurses, Rube Goldberg machines and demoralizing paperwork." Nonetheless, Henig concluded, "We should all be lucky enough to get old the way this man, and Dr. Seuss himself, has gotten old."

In 2004, Random House began a yearlong celebration in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of Geisel's birth. Having sold more books for Random House than any other author, Geisel was also depicted on a stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service. The celebration included one hundred days of events in memory of Geisel held in forty cities throughout the United States. Events included live theatrical performances, readings of his works, costume character appearances, and interactive workshops. "The celebration encompasses his life as a whole and not just him as a children's book illustrator," Random House executive Judith Haut told Joy Bean in Publishers Weekly. "He revolutionized how children learned to read, and so we knew the celebration had to equal the passion people have for his books."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) | Poetry Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known under his pseudonym "Dr. Seuss," was "probably the best-loved and certainly the best-selling children's book writer of all time," wrote Robert Wilson of the New York Times Book Review. Geisel entertained several generations of young readers with his zany nonsense...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Messages You May Have Missed Reading Dr. Seuss

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Yet another generation of moviegoers and read-to children have been
introduced to The Cat in the Hat. I wonder whether these millions of new
fans and their parents know that Theodor S. Geisel was born one hundred
years ago this month.
Who?While most of us have probably never heard of Theodor Geisel, we know his work well. Writing under the name “Dr. Seuss” (Seuss was his middle name), Geisel unveiled to millions of children the values that have defined the

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dr. Seuss was a wildly prolific author of children's books, and we often associate his stories with adorable rhymes with whimsical illustrations. But Theodor Seuss Geisel (AKA Dr. Seuss) did so much more than create a collection of zany stories for kids. His books have a crafty way of teaching children invaluable life lessons. And if you think about it, a lot of us have carried (or should carry) these lessons all the way into adulthood. Although there's always a layer of silliness in his stories, there was often a strong moral to take away too. Let's go through a few, what do you say? Let's learn a few lessons from Seuss books today.

"The Sneetches"
The lesson: Accept others even if they're different.
In this tale of two beach-dwelling bird species, Dr. Seuss makes a great point to show us how appearances don't matter. Not one bit! The star-bellied Sneetches don't get along with the other Sneetches because they think they're so much better with their fancy stars. After a sort of star-creating counterfeit operation ensues with a great number of mix-ups, "The Sneetches" concludes with a philosophical nugget we can all take home:
"The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches."

"The Lorax"
The lesson: Be an advocate for those who can't defend themselves.
Most people think of "The Lorax" as a stern warning against over-logging and polluting our environment - which is true. But we can also take it a little further by looking at a few choice lines from the book to find an even deeper meaning:
"I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues."
This one snippet is really powerful when you think about it: The Lorax takes it upon himself to stand up for other defenseless beings without reservation. It's that kind of altruistic act that we could all aspire to bring into our everyday lives a little bit more.

"Happy Birthday to You!"
The lesson: Celebrate our own individuality and uniqueness.
Sure, it's easy to be proud of who you are when a magical bird hypes you up and throws a party in your honor. But that doesn't usually happen on our birthdays in the real world. But regardless, Dr. Seuss makes a good point that people should celebrate themselves on their birthday (and every day for that matter). And just in case you forget that lesson, here's a rhyming quote to help you remember:
"I am what I am! That's a great thing to be! If I say so myself, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!"

"I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!"
The lesson: An education will take you far.
As a student of both Dartmouth and Oxford, Dr. Seuss knew the value of a good education. And living in a world without Google, the internet or anything even remotely close, he wrote about the power of books. He sums up the concept of knowledge so succinctly, it's no wonder he was able to fit so many important lessons into so few words:
"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
Pretty simple, right? Knowledge is power and it can take you places. Speaking of going places...

"Oh, The Places You'll Go!"
The lesson: Be deliberate yet flexible in life.
We can all probably agree that children's literature has a tendency to sometimes oversimplify life's many hiccups. That's what's beautiful about one of Dr. Seuss' most notable works "Oh, The Places You'll Go!" - it doesn't deny life's messiness. In fact, it embraces it:
"You'll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You'll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left."
Although we think of this book as an almost cliché gift for any recent college graduate, there's a reason people gift it as a lighthearted roadmap to life as an adult: It's honest and beautiful.

"Green Eggs and Ham"
The lesson: Step outside your comfort zone and be pleasantly surprised.
"Green Eggs and Ham" is one of the most famous Dr. Seuss stories and one of the most simply written. It only uses 50 words throughout the entire book, all because Seuss' editor bet him he couldn't do it. Well he did. And in the meantime, he showed us how great (and surprisingly tasty) things can be waiting just outside your comfort zone. Sam I Am sums up the notion nicely:
"You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may!"
And although we can all probably agree it would be tough to trust a stranger trying to force-feed us green-colored animal products, the lesson remains invaluable.

"Horton Hatches the Egg"
The lesson: Stay true to your word.
Being someone with conviction is an honorable thing indeed. And although things became quite difficult for Horton while he babysat an egg that wasn't even his, he stuck it out because he made a promise. He knew that he had to accept responsibility and do what he said he would, otherwise that poor egg would suffer the consequences. He exclaims at a certain point:

"I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful, one hundred percent!"

If that's true, we could all aim to be more like Horton and his elephant counterparts.

Hopefully that was a fun way to revisit some childhood favorites and give you a fresh perspective on them. Also, this is by no means an exhaustive list of the lessons to be learned from Dr. Seuss books.

So do us a favor, if you would.
Take a second if you could.
Have a favorite? Let us know.
Leave a comment down below!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Important Lessons That Adults Can Learn From Dr. Seuss

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From 'Cat In The Hat' to 'Green Eggs And Ham', Dr. Seuss was an amazing children's author, but he also taught us a thing or two about being a better adult. Have a look.

# data[].attributes.body
detailed life and legacy article

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Like many children since 1937, Dr. Seuss was a part of my early life with such books as Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, And to Think That! Saw It All on Mulberry Street, Horton Hatches an Egg, stories of the Sneetches, and the east-going Grinch's memorable confrontation with the west-going Grinch.

They were fun books to read, certainly more fun and interesting than the books used at school to teach us to read...Dick and Jane were interesting only for the first several months, after which they were so boring that you knew you would never play with them if they ever came by. Not, perhaps, that you would ever really want to play with the Cat in the Hat. After all, how in the world would you tell your parents what happened if the Cat didn't put everything right again?

I re-read the books and some of the newer ones when my brother, almost four years my junior, was learning to read. By that time I was off into other books and other interests and, while they were colorful and fun, no longer seemed so entertaining. Despite that, however, I can still easily recall drawings from some of my favorite early Seuss stories.

Several years ago, a book title in a catalog caught my attention: The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the Dough. Working as I then was with many people for whom English was a second language, and trying to deal with creative spelling not only inside the office but on correspondence going out to clients, the often seemingly illogical spelling of words was always simmering in my mind somewhere. I have also always had strong reactions to some words that looked just plain funny sitting there on a piece of paper; there were some words that, spoken or written or pronounced in my head gave me the creeps. When I read that the Tough Coughs book was a compilation of Dr. Seuss writings, I thought that it just might suit my frame of mind perfectly. By the time the book came, life had quickened and somehow I never had a chance to do more than flip through it hurriedly now and then.

The book was definitely a compilation of Seuss, but not the Seuss of childhood. Here was an amazing concoction of political commentary, advertising wit, off-the-wall essays on life and living, with an assortment of fantastic creatures and humans. The style of drawings were familiar, the turn of phrase and incredible names, but the topics and subjects were very different. Or so, at the time, it seemed.

This intriguing dichotomy, coupled with my recent re-reading of The Lorax and my realization that this wonderful story of greed and environmental destruction was written, not in the politically correct 1990s but when plumbers were making their nocturnal visits to the Watergate, led me to taking a closer look at this man.

What I found was a very complex individual, one who experienced great joy in life and his art and deep lows filled with self-doubt and discomfort in having to deal with those outside his close circle of friends. Here was a man who both made light of his talents but was wounded at not being taken seriously. A man of whimsy who drove others as hard as he drove himself in the production of children's literature. An iconoclast in the area of children's literature and literacy who nonetheless cared little for and was uncomfortable around children...but who made up a daughter to whom books were dedicated, and stories about whom he regaled dinner guests, much to the dismay of his wife who was unable to conceive.

Here, then, is a bit of the biographical journey I went on.

You're wrong as the deuce
And you shouldn't rejoice
If you're calling him Seuss.
He pronounces it Soice.*

*Written by Alexander Liang, a former staff member of Jack O'Lantern when under Ted Geisel's leadership, later on faculty at Dartmouth. The German pronunciation, zoice, despite the above quatrain published in the Jack, gave way to its more American and easier-to-pronounce rhymes-with-Mother-Goose sound as Ted was talked about with increasing frequency.

Ted grew up speaking both German and English. Both of his parents were born of German immigrants, and the grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins all spoke German in the home and outside in the thriving community of German-Americans, and English with the non-German-Americans in the heavily stratified social culture of Springfield.

Words fascinated Ted at an early age, a fascination aided, abetted and incited by his family. His sister, Margaretha, called herself Marnie Mecca Ding Ding Guy. His grandfather owned a brewery with another German immigrant. The brewery name was Kalmbach and Geisel, called Come Back and Guzzle by the locals. Ted's father, an expert competitive marksman who practiced every morning (something which Ted found rather ridiculous), told Ted that he must always strive for excellence, that "if you don't, you end up with schlock."

Ted's father was a park commissioner in charge of a huge park that included within its borders a zoo. This became one of young Ted's favorite haunts, and he loved to hear his father tell stories about the animals. Ted drew the animals that he saw and heard about. His parents encouraged his drawing despite the fact that the animals never quite looked like what they started out to be. One of his mother's favorites, drawn on the wall, was a Wynnmph with ears three yards long.

Ted learned to read while still very young. By six years of age, he was already reading Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. His favorite early book, however, was The Hole, a riotous book about a gun that is shot in the house whose bullet pierces the water heater and, as the house filled with water, the bullet keeps going, piercing everything in its path, through walls and furniture and doors until, in the kitchen, it hits a cake that was so hard it stops the bullet.

Ted's mother, Nettie, knew that the best way to get Ted to do anything was to bribe him with books. Ted persevered through piano lessons with Nettie seated in the anteroom outside. If he did well, he raced across the street to Johnson's Book Store where he was allowed to chose a book.

In 1937, when And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street was published, Johnson's Book Store opened to record crowds, as neighbors and acquaintances stood in tine to purchase the book, dreading an exposé. Originally titled A Story That No One Can Beat, Mulberry Street was Ted's version of The Hole, and gleefully read by many as a canny depiction of the tales of embellished truth so artfully invented by children. This theme was to reappear again in such books as McElligot's Pool, the first book Ted published after World War II.

It was this interaction, if anything, that fueled young Ted's desire to someday be an artist. "The teacher wanted me to draw the world as it is; I wanted to draw things as I saw them." This was an attitude that intensified as Ted went on to college.

At Dartmouth, Ted was fortunate to find another writing teacher who, like his high school teacher, was appreciative of his work--and wit. Ted boasted to his classmates that he could write humorously on any subject. To prove it, he wrote a book review of the Boston & Maine Railroad timetables...only Ted and the professor laughed.

Despite the fact that he had made no overtures to any of the fraternities, Ted was nonetheless surprised to not be invited by any of them to pledge. He realized that it was probably because he was taken to be Jewish, with his last name, Semitic nose and dark hair. This was in counterpoint to the hostile atmosphere that pervaded Springfield (and all of the U.S.) during the war as all German-Americans were looked at with suspicion by their former friends, business associates and neighbors. Ted felt the isolation during the war years, and found it continuing, though for different (and rather ironic) reasons at Dartmouth. "It took a year and a half before word got around that I wasn't [Jewish]. I think my interest in editing the Dartmouth humor magazine began...that pledge week."

By his junior year at Dartmouth, Ted was editor of the college humor magazine, the Jack O'Lantern, and wrote for the school paper. Typical of his cartoons was one of two chimney sweeps perched on a roof. "Should I go first?" asked the first. "Soot yourself," replied the other. Ted's whimsical use of language and artless drawings soon drew a following of students and faculty.

Ted enjoyed the extracurricular activities, including actively managing the soccer team (managing, after all, wasn't playing, and Ted continued his detestation of playing sports that started well before high school), arguing politics on the debate team, and partying. His involvement in the latter activity was perhaps more so than the former, so much so that he was named Least Likely to Succeed by his classmates. Late in his senior year, an especially raucous party in his rooms resulted in a visit from the police and a trip to the dean of college. There he was told that he had to resign from the school magazine and paper. Theodore Geisel got around this ban by submitting articles with a number of aliases, including L. Burbank, Thomas Mott Osborne (then warden of Sing Sing prison), Ted Seuss, or, merely, Seuss.

In Dartmouth, despite his growing popularity and renown as an astute wit and party man, Ted continued to remain aloof. Said one classmate: "He was not gregarious in the sense of hail-fellow-well-met; there was no sense of self-importance about him. But when he walked into a room it was like magician's act. Birds flew out of his hands, and endless bright scarves and fireworks. Everything became brighter, happier, funnier. And he didn't try. Everything Ted did seemed to be a surprise, even to him."

From where did this bleakness come? The year 1915 saw the sinking of the Lusitania by the Germans and the change of public feeling towards German-Americans. While the German-American community in Springfield was close-knit and one fairly well integrated into the social and business structures of the community, the hostility they encountered grew. Ted was shocked to hear from one of his schoolmates that he was being referred to as "the German brewer's kid with the three-legged dog."

Church services had been conducted in German, and German was the first language at homes, many businesses, at the riflery club (where his father was a top marksman) and the Turnverein community hall which sponsored an active and popular young gymnastics group. The gymnastic exhibitions grew so popular with the city at large that they were ultimately held in Courthouse Square, where a fair-like atmosphere surrounded it with German songs, bands and hearty German food. As the anti-German sentiment swept through the city, however, cross-cultural socializing became less frequent. German cultural affairs dwindled as the German-Americans, now calling themselves merely Americans, sought invisibility. They were already well known in the circle of their daily lives, however, with Ted and Marnie suffering through the taunts of schoolmates. This drew them closer together as they supported each other emotionally and worked out ways of coping with their being thrust into the social pale.

During this increasingly sensitive time, the German-American community did its best to show its support of America. The gymnasium sent forty-seven of its strongest and most able youth to war against Germany. The women and daughters spent afternoons knitting socks and afghans for American service men.

In a continuing effort to reduce the tensions, young Ted threw himself into the war effort, collecting tin foil, planting a Victory Garden of potatoes (which he forgot to harvest) and, through his Boy Scout troop, selling Liberty Bonds. Thanks to his grandfather Geisel, Ted, at age 14, ranked in the top ten of Springfield scouts in bond sales. These scouts were recognized publicly in May 1918 in a public ceremony. The awards were passed out by then-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, with thousands of townspeople thronging the huge Municipal Auditorium. There, each scout was awarded his medal by Col. Roosevelt. When Roosevelt got to Ted at the end of the line he stood perplexed, then yelled over to the scoutmaster "What's this boy doing here?" whereupon Ted was unceremoniously hustled off stage.

Roosevelt had only been provided with nine medals and the flustered scoutmaster, rather than explaining things, just hustled Ted off stage, leaving psychological scars that would affect Ted for the rest of his life. Although he had never experienced it before, Ted at this point became terribly stage stricken and from that time on became horribly shy of public appearances, his fear of public appearances bordering on the neurotic.

In Ted's thirteenth year, not only was the possibility of war between U.S. and Germany growing increasingly certain, so too was the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment: Prohibition. The future of the Kalmbach and Geisel Brewery, the largest in New England, faced economic ruin. Many of their Anglo neighbors were prohibitionists, thus worsening the tensions between them. (It was during this time that the Geisel family would engage in one of its elders' pastimes, plotting revenge and wickedness and practical jokes against their neighbors and other prohibitionists and stuffed shirts. The plots generated more laughter within the family than anything else as they were never carried out, but the residue of these family plottings show tell-tail traces in some of Seuss' later works published in Judge and other adult humor and general interest magazines.)

In Dartmouth, and later in Oxford, Ted vacillated between being a college professor, English teacher, writer or artist, exploring his options in Oxford, Corsica and Paris. His wife-to-be, Helen, a classmate at Oxford, completed her studies in England and returned to the U.S. where she taught school in New Jersey.

When Ted, then back in the U.S., finally sold a cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post, he was motivated to move from his parent's home in Massachusetts to New York to try his hand as a cartoonist. He finally sold his first cartoon to a humor magazine, Judge, and landed a job as staff writer there, as well. Taking this as a sign that things were looking up, he and Helen were married. Still quite poor, they rented a dismal apartment across from a stable in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York. When the stable horses died, they would be pulled out of the stable and dumped off into the middle of the street, there to be left for several days until picked up by the sanitation department. The magazine began having money problems, with staff sometimes being paid in goods given to the magazine by advertisers-one week Ted received 100 cartons of shaving cream; another time, 1,872 Little Gem nail clippers--so the Geisels stayed rather longer than they had anticipated in this particular location.

Ted started doing a regular cartoon column--part fact, part fiction--for Judge. To give it an air of professionalism, and wanting to save his own name for the great novel he still hoped to write one day, he signed it "Dr. Theophrastus Seuss." Theophrastus was the name of a beloved stuffed toy dog he had had since early childhood, one which, like the pseudonym itself, would remain with Ted for the rest of his days.

It was one of Ted's off-the-wall Seuss cartoons that landed him a (still above their means) Park Avenue apartment: A weary knight a-bed suddenly finds a dragon in his face. "Darn it all, another dragon! And just after I'd sprayed the whole castle with Flit." The wife of that popular pesticide product kept pestering her husband for two weeks before he finally called Ted, and thus started a popular advertising campaign and phrase, "Quick, Henry! the Flit!" Their new apartment had one benefit over their old digs at Hell's Kitchen: there were fewer dead horses. However, with their phone number one digit away from that of the local fish market, they were not about to make a lot of friends...every time someone called to order fish, Ted drew one on a piece of cardboard and had it delivered, never telling the hungry caller that they had reached a wrong number.

The Geisels themselves ate out regularly. Their lack of interest in things culinary dismayed Ted's mother when she found that the only thing in their refrigerator was the cookbook she had given them for a wedding present. Ted's mother died shortly after he started producing ads for Flit. That, combined with the fact that Flit was a spring and summer product and he was left with little to do the other seven months of the year, caused Ted to grow quite restless. Reviewing his contract with Flit, he found that one of the things he was not prevented from writing was children's books.

In 1927 he wrote his first children's book, an ABC book, that was subsequently rejected by every publisher to whom it was submitted due to Ted's somewhat impractical approach. Ted had recently discovered colored inks and, with three different reds and "about seventeen different blues," each book would have cost $150 a copy!

Ted then turned away from children's books, doing more advertising for Flit and Shell Oil as well as continued to write for humor publications. When, by 1938, more than two dozen publishers had rejected his second children's book manuscript, entitled A Story That Can't Be Beat, Ted was depressed and fed up. After an editor claimed there was "no moral or message" to be found in the book, nothing to "transform...children into good citizens," Ted fumed to Helen: "What's wrong with kids having fun reading without being preached at!"

Striding down the street after being rejected for the twenty-eighth time, crumpled Story manuscript jammed under his arm, he was on his way home to burn it when he bumped into an old Dartmouth classmate, Mike McClintock. Mike had, just three hours earlier, been appointed Children's Book Editor by Vanguard Press and was in a bind. Having sold himself to Vanguard as having many connections, he in fact had no manuscript to submit. They ran into each other, the manuscript changed hands, and several months later, U.S. children met a new doctor. (Ted was able to return the favor years later when, as one of Beginner Books' offerings in 1958, McClintock's A Fly Went By was published.)

Despite being an expensive book for its day ($1), Mulberry Street quickly sold 10,000 copies, and Ted found that not only did he enjoy writing children's books, children enjoyed reading them. Vanguard made the same discovery, and thus a relationship was born. From that time on, Ted published at a rate of almost one book a year. After Mulberry Street came The 500 Hats Of Bartholemew Cubbins in 1938, The King's Stilts (and The Seven Lady Godivas, an adult book) in 1939, and Horton Hatches an Egg in 1940, the latter books published by Ted's new editor at Random House. During these years, with the world at odds and the U.S.'s carefully preserved neutrality crumbling, he became increasingly active in producing political cartoons for PM, a noted political magazine.

Ted came face to face with his dislike for authority and his German heritage when he wrote and edited Hitler Lives. It was this film which outlined the military's new "no fraternization" policy. "The Nazi party," Ted wrote, "may be gone, but Nazi thinking, Nazi training and Nazi trickery remain. The German lust for conquest is not dead...trickery remains. You will not argue with them. You will not be friendly...There must be no fraternization with any of the German people." Although Ted wrote and produced the film, and was required to hand-carry it throughout the European theatre to obtain the personal approval from every general behind the lines and at the front, this policy made him uncomfortable, not the least of which was due to heritage. He later worked to rescind this policy, joking with colleagues in the service, "Just be a good soldier. Leave the bungling to the State Department!"

One of his side trips through the war zone was planned by former PM boss Ralph Ingersoll. He drew a map route to get Ted and his military police escort around the fighting at Bastogne, but they took a wrong turn somewhere, ending up ten miles behind the enemy line the morning of the evening that the Battle of the Bulge erupted. They remained trapped in enemy territory until rescued by British troops three days later. In Seussian rhythms, Ted recounted "The retreat we beat was accomplished with a speed that will never be beat."

Ted was in France on the first New Year's after the Allied forces occupation. Subdued despite the celebrations going on all around him, he walked through the rain down the Champs-Élysée to the Tomb of the Unknown soldier, scrawling on a piece of scrap paper a poem which began:

If he had lived, he'd probably have been 45 or so
And he might have been standing here, saluting too
At the grave of
The Unknown Soldier...

The joy all felt as the war ended was marred for Ted with word that his sister, Marnie, had died at home of coronary thrombosis after fighting years of depression and living reclusively.

The war brought other changes for the Geisels. Ted decided that he liked living where he could do some early morning gardening in his pajamas, and Helen had begun writing books for Disney. They decided to move permanently to California, eventually buying a dilapidated look-out tower in the hills overlooking the tiny community of La Jolla. Ted wrote of this place: "All the enlightened members of this community know about my books...but nobody in Southern California seems to keep 'em in stock... I gotta go out now and fight rattlesnakes, bees and man-eating rabbits in the patio..." In 1948, the tower was mostly graffiti-filled with hearts and had closets full of beer bottles. They got rid of the beer bottles and most of the hearts, and the uppermost levels became Ted's hideaway office, nicknamed "the bone pile," his term for all the sheets of discarded paper from his work on new books, each drawing done three or four times before inking the final drawing on heavy stock paper for the publisher.

When Helen was struck with complete paralysis and hospitalized for months, Ted was lost in many ways. He had once complained "All I want to do is to write books, and everybody's forever nagging at me to keep them," Unable to even make entries in their check book, bills went unpaid as he drifted from day to day, spending much of his time beside the silent Helen as she lay encased in a heart-lung machine, rigging up Seussian contraptions (a continuing reflection of his fascination with Rube Goldberg's fantastic contraptions) of mirrors so that she could see their dog outside. Whether he was truly absent minded or cunningly simple, he had through the years abrogated the business and household affairs side of their life together completely to Helen.

Though Helen recovered, she was never out of pain and never was able to work again at her former speed and strength. She continued to strongly support Ted, helped run Beginner Books, traveled to different places around the world with Ted, and made her own contributions to children's literature (under her maiden name), but the pain, fatigue and despair grew worse, even after their hiring an assistant to work with them at the Tower in La Jolla. Their close and loving relationship began to deteriorate as Helen could no longer provide the support, nurturing and protection Ted required to be able to freely create. Finally, in an act that niece Peggy said was done "out of absolute love for Ted," Helen committed suicide by overdose in the fall of 1967.

Ted was not to remain alone for long. In August of the following year, he told a colleague "My best friend is being divorced and I'm going to Reno to comfort his wife." Earlier in the spring of 1968, Audrey Stone Dimond told her husband, Grey, that she planned to leave him and marry Ted. The Geisels and the Dimonds had long been close friends, often entertaining with each other, attending numerous social events, going boating and vacationing together. Upon Audrey's announcement, Grey stood still, thinking it over a bit.

'"Who," he asked finally, "is going to do the driving?"
"Why, I guess I will," Audrey replied, astonished.
"Good," he said. "I don't want any wife of mine marrying a man who drives the way Ted does."

Audrey, like Helen, handled Ted with gentle humor and patience. When Walter Retan, friend, kindred spirit from Random House and houseguest, had trouble one morning turning off the lights in the guest bathroom, he sought Ted's assistance. Ted came in and started flipping switches but to no avail. Shrugging, finally, Ted called for Audrey. Audrey came in, pointed up to the skylight, laughed, and said "You're trying to turn off the sun!"

Ted constantly struggled against public appearances, often backing out at the last minute. Audrey, as did Helen before her, cajoled and connived and did her best to get Ted out before the public. This became even more important as Ted's health began to decline. One such time, Audrey and old Dartmouth classmate Kenneth Montgomery conspired, not telling Ted that he was the commencement speaker at Lake Forest College's graduation until he was in the car on the way to the college. He scribbled notes on the way, this time writing in verse as it came more easily to him than prose. His talk was a huge success and verse became his formula for dealing with such commencements, awards dinners and other events.

Later that spring, to an American Booksellers Association meeting in Atlanta, Ted recited:

As everyone present undoubtedly knows...
Due to a prenatal defect in my nose...
(Which seems to get worse the longer it grows)
I am completely incapable of speaking in prose...
If I could speak prose...
You would be in a fix.
I'd harangue you poor people tilI a quarter to six about Watergate memoirs and Richard the Nix. But I can't because Richard and poetry don't mix...
I've come to convey
In a most humble way
The thanks of all authors to the ABA
Were it not for our friends in the old ABA,
Every one of us authors, I vouch safe to say,
Would be engaged in the dry cleaning business today...

In high school, Ted's literary ventures were fed by Edwin "Red" Smith, his young English teacher. Considered fun and unpretentious, Smith made a great impression on much of Central High School's students, encouraging many to apply to college, especially to Dartmouth, his recent alma mater. Through Smith, Ted discovered the French-born English author Hillaire Belloc and grew to love the rhythm of Belloc's verses, including:

As a Friend to the children, commend me the Yak.
You will find it exactly the thing:
It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,
Or lead it about with a string.

In interviews as well as casual encounters, Ted often joked about where he got his inspiration, regaling listeners with tales of travel to the Arizona desert to pick ideas from the heads of retired thunderbirds (though admittedly with no idea as to where the thunderbirds got them), the reality was often less, or more, strange. While at home, he would resort to putting on one of his many hats. When out doing errands or traveling around the world, chance encounters, even sounds, were enough to start the creative process. Staring at the back of a man wearing a bowler on a train was the genesis for The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins; the sound of the laboring engines of a ship fighting stormy seas sounded, to Teds' ears, like And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street. The amiable complaint of a water-logged and very muddied soldier of "Why is it always rain? Why can't anything else come down" eventually became Bartholemew and the Oobleck. (Oobleck apparently struck a chord with children through the years, making a frequent appearance in the form of the green slime that regularly hits characters on some of the children's shows produced for the Nickelodeon channel.)

Character names were also of interesting origin. Some were words that came naturally from his childhood; between the "Come back and guzzle" brewery and a sister self-named Marnie Mecca Ding Ding Guy, it should be no wonder that one of his first creations was named the Wynnmph. The Grinch, however, was so named because, as Ted said, "I just drew him and looked at him, and it was obvious to me who he was."

In a 1957 issue of Life Magazine, writer John Hershey criticized the "Dick and Jane" readers, saying that Dr. Seuss could write better beginning readers for kids. Whether he was serious or not, Ted took it seriously enough to contact his publisher and got a list of 223 easy-to-read words. His first book, The Cat in the Hat came about because cat and hat were the first two words on the list that rhymed.

Ted thought it would be a simple matter to turn out a book, but seven months and much throwing of the manuscript across the room [another "thinking cap" technique] later, the book was sent off to the publisher. While it did not sell well at schools, it was a hit in the bookstores. The New York Herald literary review wrote: "We were afraid that the limitations Dr. Seuss put upon himself might have shackled his marvelous inventiveness. Quite the contrary. Restricting his vocabulary...and shortening the verse story has given a certain riotous unity...that is pleasing." Green Eggs and Ham had similar literary origins, with Ted's Random House editor and friend, Bennett Cerf, setting Ted another literary challenge, betting him $50 that he couldn't write a book using only fifty simple words. The success of these books led to Random House creating a whole new division of books. Ted was hired as the president of this new venture, called Beginner Books, whose logo was the Cat in the Hat.

The inspiration for one book needed no explanation amongst Ted's friends and associates. In 1985, invigorated by his reception by the graduating class at Princeton, he went back home and started You're Only Old Once!, a book which helped exorcise his health care demons by portraying the medical field and age from his unique perspective. A fragment of his writing for this, his forty-fifth book, illustrates the way he wrote in general, with a slapdash, fill-in-the-blanks sort of approach that nonetheless took hours, even months, until Ted would be satisfied with the effect:

I remember hearing my grandfather speak of a (blank) that is old at the end of one week
And a Nutchworm that's old at the end of an hour
And after three minutes a (something) feels sour
(BLANK BLANK something)...reckoned
There were some germs who get ancient in only one second

Ted wrote another book on a dare, one that was published not by a book publisher but in Art Buckwald's column. Buchwald sent Ted a copy of his book, I Never Danced At The White House, and dared him to write a political book. Ted grabbed a copy of Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now! and, knowing the fireworks were already going off at Random House, Ted told Buchwald to go ahead and run it anyway. On August 8, 1974, Buchwald's syndicated column thus began:

Richard M. Nixon, will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don't care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Richard M. Nixon, will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!

Nine days later, Nixon announced his resignation. Buchwald claimed credit, Ted claimed intent, and both bemoaned the fact that they hadn't collaborated sooner.

In later years, Ted took a philosophical view of his time at Dartmouth. "English and writing was my major," he said, "but I think that's a mistake for anybody. That's teaching you the mechanics of getting water out of a well that may not exist." It was, however, while at Dartmouth that Ted made the discovery that writing and drawing were two sides of the same coin: "I began to get it through my skull that words and pictures were Yin and Yang...that, married, [they] might produce a progeny more interesting than either parent. It took me almost a quarter of a century to find the proper way [to do it]. At Dartmouth, I couldn't even get them engaged."

If It Looks Like A Duck
In Ted's case, it was probably a goat. Calling his drawing "exaggerated mistakes", Ted once said that he drew the way he did because he couldn't draw. Ted submitted drawings for a billboard that included, as requested, the image of a goat. The advertising executive stared at it, puzzled, and said that it looked more like a duck. So Ted drew a duck, resubmitted it - and the ad exec thought it was a great goat.

"Kids exaggerate the same way I do. They overlook things they can't draw, their pencils slip, and they get funny effects. I've learned to incorporate my pencil slips into my style." A child's idea of art, Ted believed, was "pen-and-ink outlines filled in with flat color, with no modulation or subtlety...that's the way kids see things." One of Ted's favorite comments about his work was by art critic and poet Karla Kuskin, who wrote that Ted's characters all have "slightly batty, oval eyes and a smile you might find on the Mona Lisa after her first martini."

While many praised Ted's illustration, others put them down as mere 'cartoonery.' Chuck Jones was awed by Ted's imagery and use of color and line and the complexity of his drawings, calling him the "children's M.C. Escher." Though Ted once put down his art work as a "sort of psychosis deterrent...to keep from going batty," he tried to divorce himself from critical review by not selling his works. No sales meant no critics or patrons to judge them. It was only after Ted had been seriously ill for a number of years that he felt the press of time and a deepened desire for critical acclaim and so agreed to a retrospective of his work which was initially staged at the Museum of Art in San Diego.

Ted was an iconoclast, a stiff breeze blowing through the staid halls of children's literature. With drawings more cartoon- or comic book-like than what had been considered "illustrations," Ted was also among the first to put drawings on equal par with the text. His books enabled both readers and nonreaders to follow the action and the story.

In 1949, Ted was invited to lecture at a writer's conference. Contrary to his nervousness at such events, he launched himself into it with enthusiasm. Ted spent weeks researching the subject, making, for him, a scholarly effort at defining the structure of his beliefs. He felt classical mythology was "lost on children," leaving them only with the vivid images making up such myths. Æsop was "too cold, too abstract, too mathematical and intellectual," while the Illiad was "too complicated." The Odyssey was exciting, Robin Hood rewarding for its great trickery, and Robinson Crusoe fulfilled what Ted identified as chiIdren's seven basic needs: love, security, belonging to, to achieve, to know, to change, and aesthetics. He found particularly appealing the Victorian era tales by Hans Christian Anderson, Robert Louis Stevenson and the "flesh and blood" characters of Mark Twain.

Most of the time, Ted never even thought of himself as a children's author. He simply did what he did: drew pictures and wrote rhymes. Honing his style with his first books, driving himself (and the other authors writing for Beginning Books) to mercilessly high quality standards, his style remained essentially unchanged through the years. Other than his brief stint at research in 1949, Ted basically never considered that he was writing for children. He was happy that adults and children loved and bought his books, but he wrote and drew to amuse himself. No matter the many changes he went through, his books, for all their boisterous and subversive trickery, were comfortably constant in some basics: "Might never makes right; the meek shall inherit the earth; and pride frequently goeth before a fall."

Ted was frequently horrified, appalled, and outraged at the volumes of often pretentious scholarly print dedicated to his writing, the theses, dissertations and book chapters written about his children's books. Only one captured his heart and support. Terry Cronan, a psychology professor, had developed a literacy program using African-American and Hispanic students as tutors. The tutors visited low-income families, brought them Seuss books, and helped them build a book case in which the books were housed, with them often being the only books in the house. Cronan favored Ted's books, she said, because of their rhythms and repetition and their asexual and ethnic-free characters. Ted's British publisher had much the same feeling, observing that

Ted's books were popular in British adult literacy programs.
Ted's relationship with his young readers was instinctive. Some critics, pointing out his revolutionary style, his sometimes antiauthoritarian writing, and his wildly disorderly yet personable style, said that he took the side of children. Ted confirmed this in an interview, stating: "I'm subversive as hell! I've always had a mistrust of adults. [And] one reason I dropped out of Oxford and the Sorbonne was that I thought they were taking life too damn seriously."

Ted was as hard on other writers as he was himself. This often caused problems at Beginner Books as he took writers to task. He laid down strict standards (only one illustration on a page, text should not describe anything that wasn't pictured so that children could work out the story from the illustrations themselves; each pair of interfacing pages had to work as an interlocking unit). Books, said Ted, were an art form that grew increasingly complex as it was directed to younger and younger audiences. Many authors complained that Ted and Helen wanted all books to look like Ted's; none did and many authors left for other publishing houses. One team of writers did stick it out and, through a love-hate relationship with Ted as their editor, turned out a not inconsiderable body of work that Ted, despite his dislike for series, himself named the Berenstain Bears.

In an interview around his seventy-fifth birthday, Ted told the writer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review "I tend to basically exaggerate in life, and in writing, it's fine to exaggerate. I really enjoy overstating for the purpose of getting a laugh. It's very flattering, that laugh, and at the same time it gives pleasure to the audience and accomplishes more than writing very serious things. For another thing, writing is easier than digging ditches. Well, actually that's an exaggeration. It isn't."

Ted and Maurice Sendak appeared at an art exhibition of Sendak's work at the Museum of Art in San Diego. It was the first time the men had met. When asked if they liked their characters, both responded quite negatively. "If my characters gave me a dinner party, I wouldn't show up," Ted answered. "If we lived with them," said Sendak, "we'd be in the madhouse...Writing is a way to exorcise them."

Joan Knight worked as Ted's part time secretary from 1971-1973 during which time she answered his fan mail. Readers wrote him, "treating him like a philosopher, trying to interpret what he wrote, trying to get him to say he was preaching some unsaid message, but he never would. All he wanted was for people to read." One exception to this was The Lorax, the first book in which he purposely set out to write to convey a message. He wanted it unlike what he felt to be the heavy-handed books already in existence about conservation and the environment. The Lorax, with the Truffula trees inspired by the trees dotting the African landscape that he looked upon while penning the book in Kenya, was the first book he set out to write to communicate a deeply felt philosophy. Despite his claim, however, many readers do find the stories dealing subtly with racial prejudice, greed, fear of the unknown, integrity, and, of course, the perils of uninvited guests.

In 1984, Ted's cancer worsened. As he perceived the world about him heading once again into dangerous waters, he began The Butter Battle Book, taking a controversial position in the age of Reganomics and Star Wars defense systems. Some protested the brainwashing, others the ambiguous ending. In response to such a letter, Ted's secretary responded: "If there was a happy ending in reality, then there would have been no need to write this book...The book tells the truth and the truth is our only hope... [it] is the most important contribution Dr. Seuss has made in his many years of giving children something to think about." The book took off in the U.S. and in Britain, and soon foreign editions appeared, first in Japan, then in Israel. Only after its popularity was assured, however, did Random House agree to print Maurice Sendak's endorsement on the cover of subsequent editions:

"Surprisingly, wonderfully, the case for total disarmament has been brilliantly made by our acknowledged master of nonsense, Dr. Seuss. . .Only a genius of the ridiculous could possibly deal with the cosmic and lethal madness of the nuclear arms race.. .He has done the world a great service."

In late 1990, Ted's biographers asked if, after all that he had said in his books, there was anything left unsaid. Several days later, Ted handed them a sheet of paper on which he had written:

"Any message or slogan? Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I'm doing, I always tell myself, "You can do better than this.
"The best slogan I can think of to leave with the kids of the U.S.A. would be: 'We can...and we've got to...do better than this.'"
With all his words and pleas for sanity, his opposition to the arms race, illiteracy, prejudice, pollution and greed, Ted was speaking to everyone, not just children.

The occasion of Ted's seventy-fifth birthday set off a round of interviews, exhibitions, and library celebrations. Smoking incessantly throughout the interviews, Ted nonetheless quickly snubbed out the cigarettes for photo sessions because, he said, "children's book authors never smoke." As little as Ted cared to be around children, he was still acutely aware of their observations and strove to maintain his naturally nurturing and avuncular appearance for them.

The year 1975 saw the start of a five-year battle with glaucoma, cataracts, and transient blindness as the condition waxed and waned and Ted underwent numerous surgeries. His prior years of intense involvement in the publishing of his books stood him in good stead. Though he could no longer see, he was still able to be quite specific about the colors to be used in the illustrations of the book waiting to be published: he had long ago memorized the color charts and so could specify color numbers and the modifications made to the colors to attain the exact hues and tones he wanted.

In the summer of 1981, as Ted began work on Bunches of Hunches, Ted and Audry attended a dinner party. Audry had previously arranged with their hostess to ban smoking at the table. Ted picked up the no smoking card from his table, set it afire, and sent it to the hostess on a tray.

The next day he awoke with indigestion. Audry, a former nurse, checked his blood pressure. When he complained of the same ill feeling the next day, she had him admitted to the hospital where he was found to have had a minor heart attack. Always healthy and fit, Ted's doctor made only one recommendation for reform in Ted's lifestyle: no more smoking.

Ted resurrected his old pipe, filled it with radish seeds and sphagnum moss, and whenever he wanted a cigarette, he watered his pipe with an eyedropper. The most difficult time, he said, was not being able to light up a cigarette when he answered the phone, thus having no crutch with which "to ease the embarrassment of talking to someone."

In 1983, during a routine dental appointment, a small lesion was found at the base of his tongue; it was later confirmed to be a malignancy of a type linked to smoking and drinking. Thus began a series of surgeries to remove great masses of tongue, tissue and muscle following a sickening course of chemo- and radiation therapy. Typical of Ted, very few in the inner circle of friends and associates knew about what was happening for some time. Thus began years of surgeries, illness, and waning strength.

On Sept 24, 1991, Ted died at home in his studio, steps away from his drawing board and color charts, stubs of pencils and pots of ink and his closet full of hats, Audrey and Theophrastus by his side.

Fadiman did not have the benefit of reading Ted's biography, compiled during the last years of his life. As I read through some of these books, it is clear to me, at least, that Ted Geisel did play out in writing some of the themes of his life and worked through, if not completely exorcised, many of the demons that fired and inspired his life, art, philosophy, and writing. The Lorax, The Butter Battle Book, and You're Only Old Once! Are but three of the most obvious of these books; with his attempt to wake up the children, if not their parents, to the needs to preserve the ear and our sanity, and to rail against old age and the fears that accompany the betrayal of the body.

Searching deep in darkened places,
Reaching into vacant spaces,
I touch only shadow faces
Where are you?
Empty caves in endless mountains,
Dusty, dry deserted fountains
Pathless, groping, I move hoping
Where are you?
Past songless birds on lifeless trees
Cross waveless oceans, silent seas,
Through fumbling nights that find no day,
I move and try to find my way.
- Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1990.

1937 And to Think That I Saw It All on Mulberry Street Dr. Seuss Books

1938 The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins
1939 The Seven Lady God ivas* The King's Stilts
1940 Horton Hatches an Egg
1941-1946 WWII hiatus
1947 McElligot's Pool (Caldicott Honor Book)
1948 Thidwick and The Big-Hearted Moose
1949 Bartholemew and the Oobleck (Caldicott Honor Book)
1950 If I Ran the Zoo (Caldicott Honor Book)
1951 Gerald McBoing-Boing (animated film)
1953 The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T Scrambled Egg Super!
1954 Horton HearsaWho
1955 On Beyond Zebra
If I ran the Circus
1957 The Cat in the Hat
How the Grinch Who Stole Christmas 1958 Yertle the Trutle and Other Stories
The Cat in the Hat Came Back
Happy Birthday to You
1960 One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish Green Eggs and Ham
1961 The Sneetches and Other Stories Ten Apples Up On Top~
1962 Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book
1963 Hop on Pop
1963 Dr. Seuss's ABC Book
1964 The Cat in the Hat Dictionary*
1965 Fox in Socks
1965 I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew
1965 I Wish that I had Duck Feet**
1967 The Cat in the Hat Songbook*
1968 The Foot Book
1968 The Hand Book
1968 The Eye Book**
1969 I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today! and Other Stories
1969 I Can Draw It Myself!
1969 Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?
1969 My Book About Me*
1971 The Lorax (NCSS Notable Children's Trade Book)
1971 I Can Write!: A Book by Me, MyseIf**
1972 In a People House**
1972 Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now!
1974 The Shape of Me and Other Stuff
1974 There's a Wocket in My Pocket
1974 Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?
1974 The Many Mice of Mr. Brice**
1974 Wacky Wednesday**
1974 Great Day for Up!*
1975 Oh, The Thinks You Can Think!
1975 Would You Rather Be A Bullfrog?**
1976 The Cat's Quizzer
1978 I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
1979 Oh, Say Can You Say?
1982 Hunches in Bunches
1984 The Butter Battle Book
1986 You're Only Old Once
1987 I Am Not Going To Get Up Today!
1989 Oh, The Places You'll Go!

* Written by Dr. Seuss
** Written by Theo. LeSeig

Research included the following works

Dr. Seuss from Then to Now: A Catalog of the Retrospective Exhibition. 1986. San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA. pp.95

Lystad, Mary. From Dr. Matherto Dr. Seuss: 200 Years of American Books for Children. 1980. Schenkman Publishing Co., Inc. Cambridge, MA. pp. 264

Marshall, Richard (ed.). The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough. 1987. William Morrow and Company, New York, NY. pp. 143

Morgan, Judith, and Neil Morgan. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel. 1995. Random House Inc., New York, NY. pp. 346

Weidt, Maryann N. 1994. Oh, The Places He Went. Carolrhoda Books, Inc., Minneapolis MN. pp. 64.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Like many children since 1937, Dr. Seuss was a part of my early life with such books as Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, And to Think That! Saw It All on Mulberry Street, Horton Hatches an Egg, stories of the Sneetches, and the east-going Grinch’s memorable confrontation with the west-going Grinch.

# data[].attributes.body
This "how to" actually gives very beneficial details about the specific style of Dr.Suess and what makes his writing so unique

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
5 simple tips and tricks that make it easy