"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations
"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy
I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike
"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go. — Oh, the Places You’ll Go
Listen to Good Advice
Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom as he sat there on that chair: “To eat these things,” said my uncle, “you must exercise great care. You may swallow down what’s solid … BUT … you must spit out the air.” — My Uncle Terwilliger on the Art of Eating Popovers
Think Before You Speak
My father had warned me, “Don’t babble. Don’t bray. For you never can tell who might hear what you say.” My father had warned me, “But button your lip.” And I guess that I should have. I made a bad slip. — Steak for Supper
This was no time for play. This was no time for fun. This was no time for games. There was work to be done. — The Cat in the Hat Comes Back
Don’t Be Afraid to Accept Help
I floated twelve days without toothpaste or soap. I practically, almost, had given up hope When someone up high shouted, “Here! Catch the rope!” Then I knew that my troubles had come to an end And I climbed the rope, calling, “Thank you, my friend!” — I had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew
Expect the Unexpected
I heard a strange ‘peep’ and I took a quick look And you know what I saw with the look that I took? A bird laid an egg on my ‘rithmetic book! — Marco Comes Late
Try New Things
I do not like green eggs and ham! I do not like them, Sam I am.
You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may. Try them and you may, I say — Green Eggs and Ham
Take Chances
The places I hiked to! The roads that I rambled To find the best eggs that have ever been scrambled! If you want to get eggs you can’t buy at a store, You have to do things never thought of before. — Scrambled Eggs Super
Reading Expands Your Horizons
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. — I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!
Be Grateful
When you think things are bad, when you feel sour and blue, when you start to get mad … you should do what I do! Just tell yourself, Duckie, you’re really quite lucky! Some people are much more … oh, ever so much more … oh muchly much-much more unlucky than you. — Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?
Embrace your strengths
Shout loud, “I am lucky to be what I am! Thank goodness I’m not just a clam or a ham Or a dusty old jar of sour gooseberry jam! I am what I am! — Happy Birthday to You
Be Proactive
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole lot, nothing is going to get better, It’s not. — The Lorax
Remain Humble
The rabbit felt mighty important that day On top of the hill in the sun where he lay. He felt SO important up there on that hill That he started bragging as animals will … — The Big Brag
Learn to Improvise
“All I need is a reindeer. …” The Grinch looked around. But, since reindeer are scarce, there was none to be found. Did that stop the old Grinch? No! The Grinch simply said, “If I can’t find a reindeer, I’ll make one instead!” So he called his dog, Max. Then he took some red thread, And he tied a big horn on the top of his head. — How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Since Theodor Geisel published his first children's book in 1937 under the pseudonym Dr. Seuss, children and adults alike have been captivated by the charming and laconic tales of whimsical characters and imaginative worlds. But Dr. Seuss' stories are more than just catchy poems; they often wrestle with serious philosophical and moral dilemmas, whether it is Horton discovering the very essence of life or the Lorax teaching us about morality. Dr. Seuss and Philosophy explores philosophical concepts such as the nature of the good life in Oh, the Places You'll Go!, the nature of knowledge in McElligot's Pool, postmodernity in On Beyond Zebra, business and the environment in The Lorax, and moral character in How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, among many others. Anyone who loves Dr. Seuss or is interested in philosophy will find this book to be intriguing and enlightening.
Contents
Oh, the places you'll go! : the examined, happy life / Benjamin Rider
My troubles are going to have troubles with me : Schopenhauer, pessimism, and Nietzsche / Jacob M. Held
Gertrude McFuzz should've read Marx, or sneetches of the world unite / Jacob M. Held
Socratic Seuss : intellectual integrity and truth-orientation / Matthew F. Pierlott
Neither here, nor there, nor anywhere? / Randall E. Auxier
McElligot's pool : epistemology (with fish!) / Ron Novy
On beyond modernity, or Conrad and a postmodern alphabet / Jacob M. Held
From there to here, from here to there, diversity is everywhere / Tanya Jeffcoat
What would you do if your mother asked you? : a brief introduction to ethics / Jacob M. Held and Eric N. Wilson
Horton hears you, too! : Seuss and Kant on respecting persons / Dean A. Kowalski
Pragmatist ethics with John Dewey, Horton, and the lorax / Thomas M. Alexander
The Grinch's change of heart : whodunit? / Anthony Cunningham
Thidwick the big-hearted bearer of property rights / Aeon J. Skoble
Rebellion in Sala-ma-sond : the social contract and a turtle named Mack / Ron Novy
Whose egg is it, really? : property rights and distributive justice / Henry Cribbs
It's not personal , it's just bizzyneuss : business ethics, the company, and its stakeholders / Matthew F. Pierlott
Speaking for business, speaking for trees : business and environment in The lorax / Johann A. Klaassen and Mari-Gretta G. Klaassen
Dr. Seuss meets philosophical aesthetics / Dwayne Tunstall.
Dr. Seuss and Philosophy delighted thousands of readers by demonstrating the insights of these children’s classics through a playful engagement with the philosophical tradition. In More Dr. Seuss and Philosophy readers will be offered a vision of the good life through the world of Dr. Seuss. Whether it’s stoicism and care of the self in Did I ever Tell you How Lucky you Are?, facing our own mortality in You’re Only Old Once, or the value of compassion, building communities, and resolving conflicts in the parables of Horton the elephant, King Derwin of Didd, or the Butter Battle Book, the essays in this book focus on living well through the wisdom of Dr. Seuss and other philosophers.
Contributions by Elizabeth Butterfield, Cam Cobb, Timothy M. Dale, Joseph J. Foy, Kevin Guilfoy, Jacob M. Held, Glenn Jellenik, Sharon Kaye, Dennis Knepp, Rob Main, Bertha Alvarez Manninen, Jennifer L. McMahon, Matthew F. Pierlott, Janelle Pötzsch, Benjamin Rider, and Aeon J. Skoble
On the 115th anniversary of Dr Seuss’ birth, Fiona Macdonald looks at how creating wartime propaganda honed his unique vision.
“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.”
- Oh, The Places You’ll Go! (1960)
There’s a healthy dollop of wisdom percolating through the slapstick silliness and anarchic absurdity of Dr Seuss. More perhaps than any other children’s author, the musings of US writer and illustrator Theodor Seuss Geisel – who adopted the pen name Dr Seuss while at college – amount to a kind of philosophy. It’s one that has entered popular consciousness, contributing to pop song lyrics and even being cited by a Supreme Court judge. Yet there’s also a political edge to Dr Seuss that is often overlooked.
Seuss wrote and illustrated more than 60 books, which have sold over 600 million copies. His most famous, The Cat in the Hat (1957), reveals many of his signature flourishes: a delight in words for their own sake, creating ever more surreal combinations through surprising rhymes; drawings of fantastical figures and complicated inventions; and a questioning of the values and conventions of adults.
Dr Seuss with his book The Cat in the Hat, pictured in 1957 (Credit: Getty)
Arguing in a 1959 Life magazine interview that “kids can see a moral coming a mile off and they gag at it”, Seuss chose humour over dogmatism. There was a time, however, when he combined the two – and many believe it was during this period that the essential elements of Dr Seuss emerged. The surreal rhyming verse and strange creatures that populated his children’s books – whales with long eyelashes; goats joined at the beard; many-legged cows – find their roots in his World War Two propaganda cartoons.
“Dr Seuss, beloved purveyor of genial rhyming nonsense for beginning readers, stuff about cats in hats and foxes in socks, started as a feisty political cartoonist who exhorted America to do battle with Hitler? Yeah, right!” exclaims Art Spiegelman, the graphic novelist who created Maus, in the foreword to a 1999 book. Historian Richard Minear’s Dr Seuss Goes to War features nearly 200 cartoons that were left unseen for half a century – cartoons that help redraw the beloved king of the kooky.
Describing Dr Seuss’s wartime output as “very impressive evidence of cartooning as an art of persuasion”, Spiegelman explains how they “rail against isolationism, racism, and anti-semitism with a conviction and fervor lacking in most other American editorial pages of the period… virtually the only editorial cartoons outside the communist and black press that decried the military’s Jim Crow policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-semitism”. Dr Seuss, he argues, “made these drawings with the fire of honest indignation and anger that fuels all real political art”.
Taking sides
Between January 1941 and January 1943, Seuss created more than 400 political cartoons for the left-wing daily New York newspaper PM. He attacked the America First policies espoused by Lindbergh and others, who wanted to prevent the US entering World War Two; he lampooned Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini; and he pleaded for racial tolerance.
Seuss cartoon for PM, May 1941 (Credit: UC San Diego Library)
The unique galumphing menagerie of Seussian fauna and themes that later enraptured millions… come into focus in these early drawings – Art Spiegelman
Through the cartoons, we can see Seuss “develop his goofily surreal vision while he delivers the ethical goods”, argues Spiegelman. “The unique galumphing menagerie of Seussian fauna, the screwball humor and themes that later enraptured millions… come into focus in these early drawings that were done with urgency on very short deadlines.” According to Minear, most of Seuss’ later books – barring the ones teaching children to read – are political in some way. And they contain features that can be traced back to the wartime cartoons.
Seuss cartoon for PM, March 1942 (Credit: UC San Diego Library)
One, depicting a whale stranded on a mountain in a parody of American isolationists, later appeared in the 1955 book On Beyond Zebra. Another, showing a cow with many udders to represent conquered European nations being milked by Hitler, also featured in the same book. A cartoon satirising dawdling wartime producers with a teetering tower of turtles was replicated in Seuss’s 1958 book Yertle the Turtle.
Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories, 1958 (Credit: Dr Seuss/Courtesy of Random House Children’s Books)
That book is itself a political parable. “Not many people know that when he first drew Yertle, it had a Hitler moustache, so Yertle was Hitler,” Richard Minear tells BBC Culture. The story has been seen as poking fun at all despots, with one journalist arguing in 2003 that “its final lines apply as much to Saddam Hussein as they once did to the European fascists”. Another claims that its warning on the dangers of overreaching is an important lesson for business. More recently, critics of rising American nationalism have shared Seuss’ cartoons. The messages in his stories help explain the enduring power of Dr Seuss as much as his humour and poetry.
Seuss cartoon for PM, May 1941 (Credit: UC San Diego Library)
As Spiegelman argues, the wartime cartoons “make us more aware of the political messages often embedded within the sugar pill of Dr Seuss’s signature zaniness”. While Yertle is an anti-fascist tale, The Sneetches (1953) tells a story about discrimination based on stars worn on the bellies of birds (“what are those stars,” asks Spiegelman, “if not Magen Davids?”).
The Lorax, 1971 (Credit: Dr Seuss/Courtesy of Random House Children’s Books)
And The Lorax is one of the most powerful environmental fables of the 20th Century. Published in 1971, the year after the celebration of the first Earth Day, it has been described in Nature magazine as “a kind of Silent Spring for the playground set”, teaching generations of children about ecological ruin brought on by greed – and offering lessons for environmental policy today.
The Butter Battle Book animation, 1989 (Credit: Alamy)
Meanwhile, The Butter Battle Book is a parable about arms races, in particular mutually assured destruction – according to Spiegelman, its “polemic for nuclear disarmament… created a blizzard of controversy when it first appeared in 1984”. While reflecting the concerns of the Cold War era, it is also timeless satire: depicting a deadly conflict caused by something trivial, in this case toast, it recalls a war in Gulliver’s Travels sparked by an argument over how to crack an egg.
On the offensive
One problematic issue in Seuss’s wartime cartoons is touched upon in Horton Hears a Who!. “The Japanese cartoons are horribly narrow and racist and stereotyped,” says Minear. A supporter of the mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans, Seuss used offensive stereotypes to caricature the Japanese in his cartoons, leading to accusations that he was racist.
Seuss cartoon for PM, May 1941 (Credit: UC San Diego Library)
“I think he would find it a legitimate criticism, because I remember talking to him about it at least once and him saying that things were done a certain way back then,” Ted Owens, a great-nephew of Geisel, told The New York Times. “Characterizations were done, and he was a cartoonist and he tended to adopt those. And I know later in his life he was not proud of those at all.”
Seuss followed up a 1976 interview for his former college, Dartmouth, with a handwritten note in which he partially apologised for the cartoons. “When I look at them now they’re hurriedly and embarrassingly badly drawn, and they’re full of many snap judgements that every political cartoonist has to make… The one thing I do like about them, however, is their honesty and their frantic fervor. I believed the USA would go down the drain if we listened to the America Firstisms… I probably was intemperate in my attacks on them. But they almost disarmed this country at a time it was obviously about to be destroyed, and I think I helped a little bit – not much, but some – in stating the fact that we were in a war and we damned well better ought to do something about it.”
Seuss cartoon for PM, May 1941 (Credit: UC San Diego Library)
According to Minear, Horton Hears a Who! was an apology of sorts for his anti-Japanese cartoons. “It was written soon after the war, and after a visit to Japan. He doesn’t come out and explicitly say he’s recanting his earlier views but it’s a very different take.” The 1954 book is a parable about post-war relations between the US, Japan and the Soviet Union, promoting equal treatment with the line “a person’s a person no matter how small”.
Seuss was engaged in propaganda during his war years; one superior officer described him in an evaluation as a “personable zealot”. As Minear puts it: “He worked for a couple of years with Frank Capra on the Why We Fight series, which is documentary film propaganda. If you look at them now, they’re of a piece with the wartime cartoons.
Seuss cartoon for PM, May 1941 (Credit: UC San Diego Library)
“He simplified things – that was part of the wartime experience… by the time he came out of World War Two, there was a focus that hadn’t been there before.” It continued into his later children’s books. “The books themselves are in the broader sense propaganda, argument, persuasion.”
I’m subversive as hell! I’ve always had a mistrust of adults… The Cat in the Hat is a revolt against authority – Theodor Seuss Geisel
Although Dr Seuss insisted he never started out with a moral in his children’s stories, he did say “there’s an inherent moral in any story”; often he was able to use humour to mask what could be weighty topics. “He’s a genius that way,” argues Minear. “He was very conscious of what he was doing, what he was trying to do.”
Playground satire
Even The Cat in the Hat had a political edge. In Jonathan Cott’s 1983 collection of interviews, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, Seuss said in response to the suggestion that some of his books are subversive: “I’m subversive as hell! I’ve always had a mistrust of adults… Hilaire Belloc, whose writings I liked a lot, was a radical. Gulliver’s Travels was subversive, and both Swift and Voltaire influenced me. The Cat in the Hat is a revolt against authority, but it’s ameliorated by the fact that the cat cleans up everything in the end.” Spiegelman finds a precursor to the cat’s red-and-white striped hat in the headgear on the bird Seuss drew to depict the US in his political cartoons.
Dr Seuss and his most famous creation (Credit: Alamy)
Seuss himself didn’t necessarily see a huge disconnect between what he was doing during the war and what he did afterwards. “Children’s literature as I write it and as I see it is satire to a great extent – satirizing the mores and the habits of the world,” he is quoted in Cott’s book. “There’s Yertle the Turtle, which was modelled on the rise of Hitler; and then there’s The Sneetches, which was inspired by my opposition to anti-Semitism. These books come from the part of my soul that started out to be a teacher.”
The cartoons offer us a richer understanding of one of the best-selling children’s authors of all time. He revealed, when discussing The Butter Battle Book in a 1984 interview for USA Today: “I don’t think my book is going to change society. But I’m naïve enough to think that society will be changed by examination of ideas through books and the press, and that information can prove to be greater than the dissemination of stupidity.”
A long-lost manuscript from the beloved author and illustrator Dr. Seuss will be released next week, marking a quarter-century since his swan song “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” empowered us to move mountains. The posthumous “What Pet Should I Get?” arrives July 28, two years after the author’s widow unearthed the story’s text and sketches. It features the siblings from “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish” on a trip to the pet store, which we know is never that sensible with a Seuss book.
Philip Nel, author of “Dr. Seuss: American Icon,” and Guy McLain, director of the Wood Museum of Springfield History, discuss how the author’s advertising beginnings gave way to Zooks and Zummers, pulling children’s literature away from the tsk-tsking of the Dick and Jane books and obliterating the boring belief that young readers ought to be prim and proper.
Thing 1. He got his sense of poetry from his mother.
Theodor “Ted” Seuss Geisel was born on March 2, 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts, and years before his middle name became synonymous with rhyming whimsy in children’s books, “Seuss” was also his mother’s maiden name.
In their 1995 biography of the author, Judith and Neil Morgan said that connection carried significance for Seuss, who credited his mother with inspiring his well-known rhymes. Henrietta Seuss would chant softly to her children at bedtime with rhymes she memorized from her time working in her father’s bakery: “Apple, mince, lemon … peach, apricot, pineapple … blueberry, coconut, custard and SQUASH!”
“[Seuss] later said that, more than anyone else, his mother was responsible ‘for the rhythms in which I write and the urgency with which I do it,’” the Morgans wrote.
An early cartoon from Geisel in 1920 that was published in The Central Recorder, a newspaper of Central High School in Springfield. Image courtesy of Wood Museum of Springfield History Archives, Springfield Museums
Thing 2. He never had any biological children.
The popular children’s author was childless. When asked why a writer of children’s books has no children of his own, Nel said Seuss had a response ready: “You make them, I’ll amuse them.”
Seuss wrote his first children’s book, an unpublished A-B-C book of creatures, in 1931, around the same time his first wife Helen Palmer learned she could not biologically carry children, according to the Morgans’ 1995 biography.
“I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” Nel said. “In some ways, he wrote for children to speak to that need in himself.”
After Helen died by suicide in 1967, Seuss eventually remarried to Audrey Dimond, who had two daughters, in 1968.
Seuss at his drawing table. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth N. Cahill
In more than 40 books to his name, including “The Cat in the Hat” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!,” strange vehicles and animals and nonsense were the author’s way to communicate with children in general.
Unlike the didactic Dick and Jane books that preached Victorian morals, Seuss’ stories did not tell children how to behave, McLain said. He simply made children’s literature a lot more fun, he added.
Compare the Cat’s chaos to lines like “Look. Look. Oh, look. See Jane.” The made-up words and insistent rhymes did not diminish the Lorax’s environmental message or dampen the anti-discrimination story of the Sneetches. He took children seriously, Nel said.
When asked about writing for children, Seuss has said: “I don’t write for children. I write for people.”
3. The pen name “Dr. Seuss” began as a way to escape punishment in college.
In 1925, in the midst of the Prohibition Era, Seuss and his friends were caught drinking gin in his Dartmouth dormitory dorm, Nel said. As punishment, Seuss was stripped of his editorship at the college’s humor magazine, Jack-O-Lantern. However, he continued to publish work under a variety of pseudonyms, including “T. Seuss.” Several other varying monikers, such as “Dr. Theophrastus Seuss,” appeared over the years, which he eventually shortened to “Dr. Seuss” as his go-to professional pen name.
In 1961, with his book “Ten Apples Up on Top!,” Seuss began collaborating with illustrators for books he wrote. For these, he used the pseudonym “Theo. LeSieg,” which is “Geisel” spelled backward. He also published one book, 1975’s “Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo!!”, under the pen name “Rosetta Stone.” And although there’s no known evidence to support the claim, Nel said that Seuss meant to save his real name for the Great American Novel that he would one day write.
Instead, Seuss debuted the Cat and the Grinch the same year in 1957, two of his most famous characters. The Cat and the Grinch were also facets of the man, Nel said. The rule-breaking, mischievous Cat spoke to the author’s sense of play, while the Grinch represented the cantankerous part of Seuss’ personality.
He had a vanity license plate that read, “GRINCH,” Nel said.
4. He joined the war effort.
Beginning in 1941, Seuss produced political cartoons for the left-wing newspaper PM in New York. In those pages, he criticized the U.S. policy of isolationism, urging the country to enter World War II. He also lambasted anti-Semitism and racism, although his depictions of Japanese people with exaggerated racial features proved problematic.
“Insure your home against Hitler!”, a July 28, 1942
political cartoon from Dr. Seuss. Image courtesy of
Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library
“Cages cost money!”, a Dec. 15, 1941 political cartoon from Dr. Seuss.
Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library
By 1942, Seuss was keen on joining the navy, but was instead asked to make war propaganda films with Oscar-winning director Frank Capra. Joined by P.D. Eastman of “Go, Dog. Go!” fame, Mel Blanc and Chuck Jones among others, Seuss co-created Private Snafu (“Situation Normal, All Fouled Up”), a cartoon dolt in a military uniform meant to teach new recruits how to be a good soldier.
The black-and-white cartoon series was also off-color — and a hit with soldiers.
“It’s so cold, it would freeze the nuts off a jeep,” one cartoon begins.
WWII CARTOON Private SNAFU
Dr. Seuss / Chuck Jones WARNER BROS. ANIMATION
Video by Periscope Film
Seuss ended up writing most of the cartoons. The series proved a training ground for his rhymes, story development and working with limited vocabulary.
5. He was a successful ad man before a children’s author.
Seuss’ first foray into children’s literature was with “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” in 1937. Before then, he had a successful career in advertising. He wrote copy and drew advertisements for companies such as Standard Oil and Flit bug spray, which, in particular, became his most lucrative work.
Seuss had his first taste of contributing to the American vernacular in 1928 when the catchphrase “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” from one of his ads for the Flit insecticide became popular. The ad campaign was such a hit that Seuss continued to produce work for the company for 17 years.
A Flit bug spray advertisement proof, between 1930 and 1940.
Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library
A Standard Oil Company – Essolube advertisement, between 1930 and 1940.
Image courtesy of Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library
“The only good thing Adolph Hitler did in starting World War II was that he enabled me to join the Army and finally stop drawing ‘Quick, Henry, the Flit!’” Seuss is quoted as saying in Thomas Fensch’s biography of the author.
6. His all-time best-selling book was created on a bet.
Dr. Seuss’ editor Bennett Cerf bet him he couldn’t write a book using 50 or fewer words. The result is 1960’s “Green Eggs and Ham.” Although the Cat and the Grinch are among Seuss’ most iconic characters, the story of Sam-I-Am trying to convince an unknown character to eat green eggs and ham has sold more than eight million copies since publication, according to a 2011 Publishers Weekly list.
Can you craft a best-seller with these 50 words?
a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you
7. He gifted the English language with “nerd” and redefined “grinch.”
In 1950’s “If I Ran the Zoo,” a kid rattles off a list of fantastical creatures that rival the animals found in the zoo: “I’ll sail to Ka-Troo and bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo,/A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too!”
In the book, a sign identifies a “nerd” as a red and yellow and white-haired sourpuss. It appears to be the first documented instance of the word, which has since morphed into a put-down for bookish people.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Ben Zimmer said the word “nerd” has no one particular historical source, but it is a credible theory that Seuss played a role in popularizing it.
And while Seuss didn’t invent “grinch,” the word’s meaning — a grouchy person — is all him, Nel said.
“He actually changed the language,” Nel said. “There are poets that do that, but it’s not common.”
“Nerkle,” however, has yet to catch on.
8. He wrote two adult books, one with nude drawings.
“The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family” was a flop when it came out in 1939. The book featured the unclothed sisters throughout the book in a decidedly unsexy story.
“[Seuss] would like to say he felt it was a flop because he couldn’t draw sexy, naked ladies,” Nel said. “And he has a point. Imagine naked ladies drawn by Dr. Seuss. Not particularly erotic.”
On subsequent reissues, there was a claim on the books that “Lady Godivas” was “reissued by multitudinous demand,” “which is a lie because no one wanted it,” Nel said.
Besides being an interesting failure, a book of naked illustrations also upset the people’s notion of Dr. Seuss, Nel said.
His other adult book was the picture book “You’re Only Old Once,” published in 1986 about the indignities of growing older.
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By — Joshua Barajas
Joshua Barajas is the arts editor for the NewsHour. He can be reached at jbarajas@newshour.org.
