Top stories
writer Dr. Seuss
USINFO | 2013-06-08 14:59
Dr. Seuss
Theodor Seuss Geisel (pron. ˈɡaɪzəl; March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American writer, poet, and cartoonist most widely known for children's picture books written and illustrated as Dr. Seuss. He had used the pen name Dr. Theophrastus Seuss in college and later used Theo LeSieg, and once Rosetta Stone, as well as Dr. Seuss.
Geisel published 46 children's books, often characterized by imaginative characters, rhyme, and frequent use of anapestic meter. His most celebrated books include the bestselling Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton Hears a Who!, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. Numerous adaptations of his work have been created, including 11 television specials, four feature films, a Broadway musical and four television series. He won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958 for Horton Hatches the Egg and again in 1961 for And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Geisel also worked as an illustrator for advertising campaigns, most notably for Flit and Standard Oil, and as a political cartoonist for PM, a New York City newspaper. During World War II, he worked in an animation department of the United States Army, where he wrote Design for Death, a film that later won the 1947 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.
He was a perfectionist in his work and he would sometimes spend up to a year on a book. It was not uncommon for him to throw out 95% of his material until he settled on a theme for his book. For a writer he was unusual in that he preferred to only be paid after he finished his work rather than in advance.
Geisel's birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association.
Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Theodor Robert and Henrietta (Seuss) Geisel.All of his grandparents were German immigrants.His father managed the family brewery and later supervised Springfield's public park system after the brewery closed because of Prohibition.Mulberry Street in Springfield, made famous in Dr. Seuss' first children's book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street!, is less than a mile southwest of his boyhood home on Fairfield Street. Geisel was raised a Lutheran.Geisel enrolled at Springfield Central High School in 1917 and graduated in 1921. He took an art class as a freshman and later became manager of the school soccer team.
College
Geisel attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1925.At Dartmouth, he joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity[4] and the humor magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, eventually rising to the rank of editor-in-chief.
While at Dartmouth, Geisel was caught drinking gin with nine friends in his room.As a result, Dean Craven Laycock insisted that he resign from all extracurricular activities, including the college humor magazine.To continue work on the Jack-O-Lantern without the administration's knowledge, Geisel began signing his work with the pen name Seuss. His first work signed as Dr. Seuss appeared after he graduated, six months into his work for The Judge, where his weekly feature Birdsies and Beasties appeared.Geisel was encouraged in his writing by professor of rhetoric W. Benfield Pressey, whom he described as his big inspiration for writing at Dartmouth.Upon graduating from Dartmouth, he entered Lincoln College, Oxford, intending to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in English literature.At Oxford, he met his future wife, Helen Palmer, whom he married in 1927, and returned to the United States without earning a degree.
Earliest post-college publications
He began submitting humorous articles and illustrations to Judge, Life, Vanity Fair, and Liberty. One notable Technocracy Number made fun of the technocracy movement and featured satirical rhymes at the expense of Frederick Soddy.The July 16, 1927, issue of the The Saturday Evening Post published his first cartoon under the name Seuss.He became nationally famous from his advertisements for Flit, a common insecticide at the time. His slogan, Quick, Henry, the Flit! became a popular catchphrase. Geisel supported himself and his wife through the Great Depression by drawing advertising for General Electric, NBC, Standard Oil, Narragansett Brewing Company and many other companies. In 1935, he wrote and drew a short-lived comic strip called Hejji.
In 1937, while Geisel was returning from an ocean voyage to Europe, the rhythm of the ship's engines inspired the poem that became his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.It was rejected 27 times (numbers will vary).Geisel wrote four more children's books before the US entered World War II. This included The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins in 1938 as well as The King's Stilts and The Seven Lady Godivas in 1939, all of which were, atypically for him, in prose. This was followed by Horton Hatches the Egg in 1940, in which Geisel returned to the use of poetry.
Essomarine
Geisel gained a significant public profile through a program for motor boat lubricants produced by Standard Oil under the brand name Essomarine. He later recounted that Harry Bruno, Ted Cook, and Verne Carrier worked with him for exhibits at the National Motor Boat Show called the Seuss Navy.In 1934 Geisel produced a 30-page booklet entitled Secrets of the Deep, which was available by mail after June. At the January boat show for 1935, visitors filled out order cards to receive Secrets. Geisel drew up a Certificate of Commission for visitors in 1936. A mock ship deck called SS Essomarine provided the scene where photos of Admirals were taken. That summer Geisel released a second volume of Secrets. For the 1937 show, he sculpted Marine Muggs and designed a flag for the Seuss Navy. The following year featured Little Dramas of the Deep, a six-act play with ten characters. According to Geisel's sister, He plans the whole show with scenery and action and then, standing in a realistic bridge, reels off a speech which combines advertising with humor. For 1939, exhibitors made available the Nuzzlepuss ashtray and illustrated tide-table calendars. On 11 January 1940, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, a Seuss Navy Luncheon was held. At that year's boat show, Geisel provided the Navigamarama exhibit and the Sea Lawyers Gazette. The final contribution to the Essomarine project, in 1941, was the mermaid Essie Neptune and her pet whale. The exhibit offered photos for a Happy Cruising passport.
World War II-era work
'The Goldbrick', Private Snafu episode written by Geisel, 1943
As World War II began, Geisel turned to political cartoons, drawing over 400 in two years as editorial cartoonist for the left-leaning New York City daily newspaper, PM.Geisel's political cartoons, later published in Dr. Seuss Goes to War, denounced Hitler and Mussolini and were highly critical of non-interventionists (isolationists), most notably Charles Lindbergh, who opposed US entry into the war.One cartoon depicted all Japanese Americans as latent traitors or fifth-columnists, while at the same time other cartoons deplored the racism at home against Jews and blacks that harmed the war effort. His cartoons were strongly supportive of President Roosevelt's handling of the war, combining the usual exhortations to ration and contribute to the war effort with frequent attacks on Congress(especially the Republican Party),parts of the press (such as the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald),and others for criticism of Roosevelt, criticism of aid to the Soviet Union, investigation of suspected Communists,and other offences that he depicted as leading to disunity and helping the Nazis, intentionally or inadvertently.
In 1942, Geisel turned his energies to direct support of the U.S. war effort. First, he worked drawing posters for the Treasury Department and the War Production Board. Then, in 1943, he joined the Army as a Captain (OF-2) and was commander of the Animation Department of the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces, where he wrote films that included Your Job in Germany, a 1945 propaganda film about peace in Europe after World War II; Our Job in Japan, and the Private Snafu series of adult army training films. While in the Army, he was awarded the Legion of Merit.Our Job in Japan became the basis for the commercially released film, Design for Death (1947), a study of Japanese culture that won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature.Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950), which was based on an original story by Seuss, won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.
Later years
After the war, Geisel and his wife moved to La Jolla, California. Returning to children's books, he wrote many works, including such favorites as If I Ran the Zoo, (1950), Horton Hears a Who! (1955), If I Ran the Circus (1956), The Cat in the Hat (1957), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957) and Green Eggs and Ham (1960). Although he received numerous awards throughout his career, Geisel won neither the Caldecott Medal nor the Newbery Medal. Three of his titles from this period were, however, chosen as Caldecott runners-up (now referred to as Caldecott Honor books) McElligot's Pool (1947), Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949), and If I Ran the Zoo (1950). Dr Seuss also wrote the musical and fantasy film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, which was released in 1953. The movie was a critical and financial failure, and Geisel never attempted another feature film. During the 1950s, he also published a number of illustrated short stories, mostly in Redbook Magazine. Some of these were later collected (in volumes such as The Sneetches and Other Stories or reworked into independent books (If I Ran the Zoo). A number have never been reprinted since their original appearances.
In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, William Ellsworth Spaulding, the director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin who later became its Chairman, compiled a list of 348 words he felt were important for first-graders to recognize and asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words.Spaulding challenged Geisel to bring back a book children can't put down. Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. It retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Geisel's earlier works, but because of its simplified vocabulary, it could be read by beginning readers. The Cat in the Hat and subsequent books written for young children achieved significant international success and they remain very popular today. In 2009 Green Eggs and Ham sold 540,366 copies, The Cat in the Hat sold 452,258 copies, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960) sold 409,068 copies—outselling the majority of newly published children's books.
Geisel went on to write many other children's books, both in his new simplified-vocabulary manner (sold as Beginner Books) and in his older, more elaborate style.
On October 23, 1967, suffering from a long struggle with illnesses including cancer—as well as emotional pain over her husband's affair with Audrey Stone Dimond—Geisel's wife, Helen Palmer Geisel, committed suicide.Geisel married Dimond on June 21, 1968. Though he devoted most of his life to writing children's books, Geisel had no children of his own. He would say, when asked about this, You have 'em; I'll entertain 'em.
Illness, death and posthumous honors
Geisel died of throat cancer on September 24, 1991, at his home in La Jolla at the age of 87.He was cremated and his ashes were scattered. On December 1, 1995, four years after his death, University of California, San Diego's University Library Building was renamed Geisel Library in honor of Geisel and Audrey for the generous contributions they made to the library and their devotion to improving literacy.
While Geisel was living in La Jolla, the United States Postal Service and others frequently confused him with another La Jolla resident, Dr. Hans Suess. Their names have been linked together posthumously the personal papers of Hans Suess are housed in the Geisel Library.
In 2002, the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden opened in his birthplace of Springfield, Massachusetts; it features sculptures of Geisel and of many of his characters. On May 28, 2008, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced that Geisel would be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony took place December 15 and his widow Audrey accepted the honor in his place. On March 2, 2009, the web search engine Google temporarily changed its logo to commemorate Geisel's birthday (a practice it often follows for various holidays and events).
At his alma mater, Dartmouth, where over 90% of incoming first-year students participate in pre-registration Dartmouth Outing Club trips into the New Hampshire wilderness, it is traditional for students returning from the trips to overnight at Dartmouth's Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, where they are served green eggs and ham for breakfast in honor of Dr. Seuss. On April 4, 2012, the Dartmouth Medical School renamed itself the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine in honor of their many years of generosity to the college.
Dr. Seuss's honors include two Academy awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize.
Dr. Seuss has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at the 6500 block of Hollywood Boulevard.
He was a perfectionist in his work and he would sometimes spend up to a year on a book. It was not uncommon for him to throw out 95% of his material until he settled on a theme for his book. For a writer he was unusual in that he preferred to only be paid after he finished his work rather than in advance.
Geisel's birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association.
Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Theodor Robert and Henrietta (Seuss) Geisel.All of his grandparents were German immigrants.His father managed the family brewery and later supervised Springfield's public park system after the brewery closed because of Prohibition.Mulberry Street in Springfield, made famous in Dr. Seuss' first children's book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street!, is less than a mile southwest of his boyhood home on Fairfield Street. Geisel was raised a Lutheran.Geisel enrolled at Springfield Central High School in 1917 and graduated in 1921. He took an art class as a freshman and later became manager of the school soccer team.
College
Geisel attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1925.At Dartmouth, he joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity[4] and the humor magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, eventually rising to the rank of editor-in-chief.
While at Dartmouth, Geisel was caught drinking gin with nine friends in his room.As a result, Dean Craven Laycock insisted that he resign from all extracurricular activities, including the college humor magazine.To continue work on the Jack-O-Lantern without the administration's knowledge, Geisel began signing his work with the pen name Seuss. His first work signed as Dr. Seuss appeared after he graduated, six months into his work for The Judge, where his weekly feature Birdsies and Beasties appeared.Geisel was encouraged in his writing by professor of rhetoric W. Benfield Pressey, whom he described as his big inspiration for writing at Dartmouth.Upon graduating from Dartmouth, he entered Lincoln College, Oxford, intending to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in English literature.At Oxford, he met his future wife, Helen Palmer, whom he married in 1927, and returned to the United States without earning a degree.
Earliest post-college publications
He began submitting humorous articles and illustrations to Judge, Life, Vanity Fair, and Liberty. One notable Technocracy Number made fun of the technocracy movement and featured satirical rhymes at the expense of Frederick Soddy.The July 16, 1927, issue of the The Saturday Evening Post published his first cartoon under the name Seuss.He became nationally famous from his advertisements for Flit, a common insecticide at the time. His slogan, Quick, Henry, the Flit! became a popular catchphrase. Geisel supported himself and his wife through the Great Depression by drawing advertising for General Electric, NBC, Standard Oil, Narragansett Brewing Company and many other companies. In 1935, he wrote and drew a short-lived comic strip called Hejji.
In 1937, while Geisel was returning from an ocean voyage to Europe, the rhythm of the ship's engines inspired the poem that became his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.It was rejected 27 times (numbers will vary).Geisel wrote four more children's books before the US entered World War II. This included The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins in 1938 as well as The King's Stilts and The Seven Lady Godivas in 1939, all of which were, atypically for him, in prose. This was followed by Horton Hatches the Egg in 1940, in which Geisel returned to the use of poetry.
Essomarine
Geisel gained a significant public profile through a program for motor boat lubricants produced by Standard Oil under the brand name Essomarine. He later recounted that Harry Bruno, Ted Cook, and Verne Carrier worked with him for exhibits at the National Motor Boat Show called the Seuss Navy.In 1934 Geisel produced a 30-page booklet entitled Secrets of the Deep, which was available by mail after June. At the January boat show for 1935, visitors filled out order cards to receive Secrets. Geisel drew up a Certificate of Commission for visitors in 1936. A mock ship deck called SS Essomarine provided the scene where photos of Admirals were taken. That summer Geisel released a second volume of Secrets. For the 1937 show, he sculpted Marine Muggs and designed a flag for the Seuss Navy. The following year featured Little Dramas of the Deep, a six-act play with ten characters. According to Geisel's sister, He plans the whole show with scenery and action and then, standing in a realistic bridge, reels off a speech which combines advertising with humor. For 1939, exhibitors made available the Nuzzlepuss ashtray and illustrated tide-table calendars. On 11 January 1940, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, a Seuss Navy Luncheon was held. At that year's boat show, Geisel provided the Navigamarama exhibit and the Sea Lawyers Gazette. The final contribution to the Essomarine project, in 1941, was the mermaid Essie Neptune and her pet whale. The exhibit offered photos for a Happy Cruising passport.
World War II-era work
'The Goldbrick', Private Snafu episode written by Geisel, 1943
As World War II began, Geisel turned to political cartoons, drawing over 400 in two years as editorial cartoonist for the left-leaning New York City daily newspaper, PM.Geisel's political cartoons, later published in Dr. Seuss Goes to War, denounced Hitler and Mussolini and were highly critical of non-interventionists (isolationists), most notably Charles Lindbergh, who opposed US entry into the war.One cartoon depicted all Japanese Americans as latent traitors or fifth-columnists, while at the same time other cartoons deplored the racism at home against Jews and blacks that harmed the war effort. His cartoons were strongly supportive of President Roosevelt's handling of the war, combining the usual exhortations to ration and contribute to the war effort with frequent attacks on Congress(especially the Republican Party),parts of the press (such as the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald),and others for criticism of Roosevelt, criticism of aid to the Soviet Union, investigation of suspected Communists,and other offences that he depicted as leading to disunity and helping the Nazis, intentionally or inadvertently.
In 1942, Geisel turned his energies to direct support of the U.S. war effort. First, he worked drawing posters for the Treasury Department and the War Production Board. Then, in 1943, he joined the Army as a Captain (OF-2) and was commander of the Animation Department of the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces, where he wrote films that included Your Job in Germany, a 1945 propaganda film about peace in Europe after World War II; Our Job in Japan, and the Private Snafu series of adult army training films. While in the Army, he was awarded the Legion of Merit.Our Job in Japan became the basis for the commercially released film, Design for Death (1947), a study of Japanese culture that won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature.Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950), which was based on an original story by Seuss, won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.
Later years
After the war, Geisel and his wife moved to La Jolla, California. Returning to children's books, he wrote many works, including such favorites as If I Ran the Zoo, (1950), Horton Hears a Who! (1955), If I Ran the Circus (1956), The Cat in the Hat (1957), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957) and Green Eggs and Ham (1960). Although he received numerous awards throughout his career, Geisel won neither the Caldecott Medal nor the Newbery Medal. Three of his titles from this period were, however, chosen as Caldecott runners-up (now referred to as Caldecott Honor books) McElligot's Pool (1947), Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949), and If I Ran the Zoo (1950). Dr Seuss also wrote the musical and fantasy film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, which was released in 1953. The movie was a critical and financial failure, and Geisel never attempted another feature film. During the 1950s, he also published a number of illustrated short stories, mostly in Redbook Magazine. Some of these were later collected (in volumes such as The Sneetches and Other Stories or reworked into independent books (If I Ran the Zoo). A number have never been reprinted since their original appearances.
In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, William Ellsworth Spaulding, the director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin who later became its Chairman, compiled a list of 348 words he felt were important for first-graders to recognize and asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words.Spaulding challenged Geisel to bring back a book children can't put down. Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. It retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Geisel's earlier works, but because of its simplified vocabulary, it could be read by beginning readers. The Cat in the Hat and subsequent books written for young children achieved significant international success and they remain very popular today. In 2009 Green Eggs and Ham sold 540,366 copies, The Cat in the Hat sold 452,258 copies, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960) sold 409,068 copies—outselling the majority of newly published children's books.
Geisel went on to write many other children's books, both in his new simplified-vocabulary manner (sold as Beginner Books) and in his older, more elaborate style.
On October 23, 1967, suffering from a long struggle with illnesses including cancer—as well as emotional pain over her husband's affair with Audrey Stone Dimond—Geisel's wife, Helen Palmer Geisel, committed suicide.Geisel married Dimond on June 21, 1968. Though he devoted most of his life to writing children's books, Geisel had no children of his own. He would say, when asked about this, You have 'em; I'll entertain 'em.
Illness, death and posthumous honors
Geisel died of throat cancer on September 24, 1991, at his home in La Jolla at the age of 87.He was cremated and his ashes were scattered. On December 1, 1995, four years after his death, University of California, San Diego's University Library Building was renamed Geisel Library in honor of Geisel and Audrey for the generous contributions they made to the library and their devotion to improving literacy.
While Geisel was living in La Jolla, the United States Postal Service and others frequently confused him with another La Jolla resident, Dr. Hans Suess. Their names have been linked together posthumously the personal papers of Hans Suess are housed in the Geisel Library.
In 2002, the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden opened in his birthplace of Springfield, Massachusetts; it features sculptures of Geisel and of many of his characters. On May 28, 2008, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced that Geisel would be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony took place December 15 and his widow Audrey accepted the honor in his place. On March 2, 2009, the web search engine Google temporarily changed its logo to commemorate Geisel's birthday (a practice it often follows for various holidays and events).
At his alma mater, Dartmouth, where over 90% of incoming first-year students participate in pre-registration Dartmouth Outing Club trips into the New Hampshire wilderness, it is traditional for students returning from the trips to overnight at Dartmouth's Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, where they are served green eggs and ham for breakfast in honor of Dr. Seuss. On April 4, 2012, the Dartmouth Medical School renamed itself the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine in honor of their many years of generosity to the college.
Dr. Seuss's honors include two Academy awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize.
Dr. Seuss has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at the 6500 block of Hollywood Boulevard.
