"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]


Saturday, June 19, 2021

Dr. Seuss' Radical Politics


The Lorax, 1971 (Credit: Dr Seuss/Courtesy of Random House Children’s Books)



The surprisingly radical politics of Dr Seuss

by Fiona Macdonald
2nd March 2019

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.

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.

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.
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.
“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.”
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.
“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.”


Whooo Was Dr. Seuss ??


The Story of Dr. Seuss




Theodor Seuss Geisel: The Real Dr. Seuss




8 things you didn’t know about Dr. Seuss

Canvas Arts | Jul 22, 2015


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.

---

By — Joshua Barajas

A Tribute to Dr. Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

 



From the Archives: Theodor Geisel dies at 87;
wrote 47 Dr. Seuss books

September 26, 1991
Reporting from San Diego
[abridged by R.E. Slater]


SAN DIEGO — Theodor (Ted) Geisel, whose whimsical, humorous books written under the pen name of Dr. Seuss confounded the literary establishment but entertained generations of children and parents, died Tuesday night at the age of 87.

Geisel, who never had any children of his own and who would quip, “You have ‘em, I’ll amuse ‘em,” died at his hilltop home on Mt. Soledad with his wife, Audrey, at his side.

Geisel had undergone massive radiation and chemotherapy for cancer of the palate over the past nine years but still lost part of his jaw to cancer and, in recent weeks as his health slipped because of several maladies, he was given more to scrawling notes on paper than speaking.

A family spokeswoman said that there will be no funeral services, and that Geisel’s remains will cremated. A memorial service will be held, she said, but has not been scheduled.

Geisel, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize citation in 1984 for his contribution to children’s literature, was one of the best known, most imitated and prolific children’s writers. His 47 books were translated into 20 languages and have sold more than 200 million copies.

Of the top 10 best-selling hard-cover children’s books of all time, Geisel contributed four: “The Cat in the Hat,” “Green Eggs and Ham,” “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,” and “Hop on Pop,” according to Publishers Weekly.

His latest title, “Six by Seuss,” released this year, was a collection of six previous children’s stories, including his first, published in 1937: “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.”

His last new story was published in 1990: “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” The book, about moving through the highs and lows of the human experience, has proven as popular among kindergartners as college graduates and corporate executives.

It is not only the longest-running among the current fictions on the New York Times bestsellers’ list, but concurrently crowned Publishers Weekly’s children’s bestseller list. The feat brought Geisel his greatest professional pleasure.
“Finally I can say that I write not for kids, but for people ,” he told friends of the tandem accomplishment.

 


Chuck Jones

Animator Chuck Jones first met Geisel when the two were making sometimes slightly profane Army training films during World War II.

Twenty years later, Jones recalled Wednesday, he suggested that Geisel take “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” to television. There, it proved to be a classic that will run for the 26th consecutive year this holiday season.

Jones, who now lives in Orange County, said he took the “Grinch” storyboards to 24 prospective sponsors before a group of bankers agreed to put it on the air.

“It cost $350,000 and paid for itself in its first year,” he said.

Jones also remembered how “Green Eggs and Ham” came to be a book:
Publisher “Bennett Cerf bet him he couldn’t write a book using fewer than 50 words. There are 49. Count ‘em.”
At his death, Geisel was developing a screenplay for “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” on behalf of Tri-Star Productions, said his agent, Bob Tabian. Although his characters have appeared on television, this would would have been Geisel’s first full-length animated release.

Seuss had no other books in the works at the time of his death, Tabian said.

His books were forays into the world of nonsense and fantasy, with characters who captivated children through humor, rhyme and mischief--especially mischief--but laced with contemporary social and moral messages.

“Yertle the Turtle” narrated the turtle king’s fall, caused by overweening ambition. “Horton Hears a Who!” tackled narrow-mindedness. The Sneetches paid for a lesson in class prejudice, and Horton came back to hatch the egg and learn about the rewards of acting with honor. Other themes addressed the doomed environment, the insanity of the nuclear arms buildup--and, in “Green Eggs and Ham,” the virtues of tasting food that looks yucky.

But, although many children’s authors lectured children to behave, Seuss gave children vicarious thrills as they followed the antics of the Cat in the Hat who refused to obey the rules of the house.
They loved his loraxes and yopps, grinches grouching in grickle-grass, sneetches lurking in lerkims, the green-headed Quilligan quail.

 


Geisel was the illustrator first, writer second

He would tack his drawings onto the corkboard of his studio walls in storyboard fashion, muse over them, then write the appropriate nonsense couplets to accompany them. Sometimes an illustrated story line would befuddle him for two years before he could marry it to words; other times, he’d crank out his verses in just a few days.
“He wrote from a graphic point of view,” said Janet Schulman, publisher of the children’s book division at Random House and his personal editor. “He would leave his drawings up there on the wall, and, if he was blocked, he’d move on to another story.

“If all our authors were as he was, we wouldn’t need editors,” Schulman said. “Occasionally he’d give us a rhyme that was a little off, or a word that might not work. He’d think about it and sometimes he’d change it--but usually he wouldn’t, and that was fine.

“There will never be another Ted Geisel.”
Personal friends said Geisel painstakingly separated his close-knit social life from his book work--literally a self-disciplined 9:30 to 5:30 job where he would sequester himself in a studio that provided him with a 180-degree view of the Pacific coastline from Mexico to Oceanside.

What linked Seuss and Geisel was humor.

“He never, quote, told jokes, but he’s funnier and more spontaneous than anyone I’ve ever known,” said close friend and fellow author Jeanne Jones. “He was, without a doubt, the brightest person I’ve ever known.”

It was through his ability to finesse nonsense and humor that Geisel helped introduce a new order to traditional children’s literature.

In an interview in 1984, Geisel pulled off the shelf “The Riverside Reader,” a dusty, dog-eared primer he used in 1909 when he was in the first grade. As he turned the pages, he pointed out the dull passages and mundane story line.
“I wanted to get rid of primers like this,” he said. “I feel my greatest accomplishment was getting rid of Dick and Jane and encouraging students to approach reading as a pleasure, not a chore.

“The old readers were the most stultifying, stupid way to teach kids. That constant repetition just turned them off to reading. I tried to turn them on.”

riverside reader series - premier

riverside reader series - no. two

   


riverside reader series - no. five







Geisel's Impact

Geisel had a tremendous impact on children’s reading habits and the way reading is taught. He never wrote a textbook per se--he wanted nothing to do with a book that children were forced to read--but his works have been used as supplementary readers for decades.

“He’s one of the pillars in children’s literature,” said Isabel Schon, a professor of children’s literature at California State University, San Marcos, and a consultant to children’s book publishers.

“Education today is embracing what we call a ‘whole language approach,’ in which children read books they enjoy, versus books they’re told to read for teaching’s sake, and Geisel’s books are central to that theory.”

Geisel won acclaim from his audience long before he received it from the critics.

“He went through a long period of being a bit condescended to by the children’s literature critical establishment,” said John Donovan, president of the Children’s Book Council, a New York-based national trade association of children’s book publishers.

“For a long time, there was a kind of dismissive view of him because he was too popular . . . and because his vocabulary was so simple. But, as time has worn on, they’ve done a complete about-face.

“Today, there’s a deep appreciation that his popularity is rooted in his clear ability not just to please kids--and also adults--but to also reach them at some meaningful level. His books weren’t simple-minded.”


Oddbits

Geisel never published a book under his real name. The “Dr.” title he added as a farce to amuse his friends. Seuss is his middle name, and he was saving his own name for the great American novel. But when he finally wrote his novel--"The Seven Lady Godivas"--he was dissatisfied. That book, published in 1937, was his only commercial flop.
“I had no ability as a novelist,” Geisel said. “I spent all my time trying to get rid of extraneous words and boiling the thing down to the essentials. But a novelist’s technique is putting those extraneous, nonessential things back in.”
That was Geisel’s style even when giving speeches to conventions of librarians or book sellers.

“When others would make these long speeches, Ted would write a little poem that was appropriate for the occasion, one that would just take three or four minutes to read,” Donovan said.

“He was as brief and as cryptic as possible, and we’d listen to every word because he’d say so much in a very few words.”
Geisel said of his style: “I prefer to write just the essentials and then add the elaboration through a drawing. Once in a while, I have to write something in an adult magazine. I get so frustrated; I wish I could get rid of all the garbage of excess words; I could draw what I want to say in a second.”
He never attempted a second novel, although he did write a Seussian-like book on the travails of aging that he uncharacteristically directed for his older audience: “You’re Only Old Once!: A Book for Obsolete Children.”

You're Only Old Once! 📖❤️ By Dr. Seuss
READ ALOUD w/ PUPPETS ❤️📖


The book was inspired by Geisel’s own confrontation with mortality and of being subjected to a battery of medical tests--and staring too long at fish aquariums in hospital waiting rooms. He vented his frustration at the whole medical process this way:

“When at last we are sure you’ve been properly pilled, then a few paper forms
must be properly filled so that you and your heirs may be properly billed.”

The book quickly sold out a first printing of 200,000 copies and shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction.

Despite its success, Geisel still found writing children’s books “entirely satisfying.” Great literature never captivated Geisel anyway. His reading tastes were “trashy,” and he preferred a best seller or a Reader’s Digest condensed book to a well-written novel.

Geisel’s taste in painting was far more sophisticated, and he could discuss obscure British painters and French museums authoritatively. The one great regret of his career, Geisel said, was that he never refined his skills as a painter.

“I’m honest enough with myself to know I wouldn’t have written the Great
American Novel,” he said, “but I think I could have created some fine paintings.”

Not that Geisel the artist wasn’t recognized. Although he never was awarded the Caldecott Medal for illustration (he won it for writing), a Dr. Seuss retrospective exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art in 1986 attracted 200,000 visitors. Although scorned by some serious artists, it was one of the most popular exhibits ever staged at the museum, officials there said.

Theodor Geisel aka Dr. Seuss 1986


Personal History

Geisel grew up in Springfield, Mass., where his father ran the park system, which included the town zoo. Many of his wild characters were born while he sat on a zoo bench and conjured up visions and variations of the exotic animals.

He studied literature at Dartmouth College, where he drew cartoons for Jack-O-Lantern, a humor magazine. He then attended Oxford University and planned to get a doctorate and teach English literature. But he soon tired of the academic life and decided to return home.

The famous Seuss verse and meter were born in the Atlantic Ocean on the liner Kungsholm. He became preoccupied with the rhythm of the ship’s engines and began experimenting with words to fit the meter. Those early scrawlings led to his first book, “Mulberry Street.” It was rejected by 27 publishers before it was picked up by Vanguard Press.

Geisel had a full career “writing for adults” before he began writing Dr. Seuss books full time. He was a political cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM, and during World War II was attached to a documentary film-making unit headed by famed director Frank Capra, who died Sept. 3[, 1991].

After writing and directing indoctrination movies for American troops, Geisel won an Oscar for best documentary short for a troop film that was released after the war by Warner Brothers. He won another Academy Award in 1947 for “Design of Death,” a documentary film about Japanese warlords. He received a third Oscar in 1951 for an animated cartoon: “Gerald McBoing-Boing.”

His finished his Hollywood work by writing the screenplay for the film, “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T,” a fantasy about a crazed music teacher, a giant piano and 500 music students. Even though it became a cult hit, he distanced himself from it, angry over script changes after it left his typewriter.

Many of the techniques Geisel learned in Hollywood were useful when he began writing children’s books.
“I learned a great deal from Capra that still helps me in my writing,” he said. “He showed me how to edit a script. Anything that hastened the plot, or told the story, he underlined with a blue pencil. You’d be surprised how few blue pencil marks most manuscripts have. I’ve tried to ensure that the majority of my manuscripts merited blue pencil marks.”
After a brief, but successful film career, Geisel moved to La Jolla. He wanted to work alone and have the freedom of “making my own mistakes without the help of committees.”

He met his first wife, Helen Marion Palmer, at Oxford, and they built their La Jolla workplace-retreat on 6 acres after moving from Los Angeles in 1948. She died in 1967 after nearly 40 years of marriage. Geisel and his second wife, the former Audrey Stone Dimond, were married 23 years.

He had no children in either marriage and professed no universal love for the younger generation. He said impatiently that children are no different from adults--he liked some and disliked others. For a man who had so many young readers, Geisel rarely spent time with children.
“I don’t think spending your days surrounded by kids is necessary to write the kind of books I write,” he said. “I don’t write for children, I write for people. Once a writer starts talking down to kids, he’s lost. Kids can pick up on that kind of thing.” 

 

To Tell the Truth - Dr. Seuss; PANEL
Joan Bennett (Apr 29, 1958)



Temperment

Geisel was described by acquaintances as a shy, sometimes cranky man, who had a pathological fear of audiences. He refused numerous speaking engagements and offers to appear on television talk shows--though he softened his resistance somewhat after winning the Pulitzer citation in 1984.
“I don’t like audiences,” he said. “I prefer to make my mistakes in private.”
Geisel was sensitive to the condescension that often is directed toward a children’s writer. He grew tired of defending his work to people who dismissed him as a “kid’s author.”

Most of his books were “mildly philosophical,” leavened with the trademark nonsense and humor. But occasionally Geisel grew irritated with the course of current events and wrote a children’s book with political overtones.

“The Lorax,” a tale about the evils of pollution, was his favorite book, he said--and one that was nearly removed from the second-grade reading list in the tiny Northern California logging town of Laytonville in 1989 because, critics said, it was a thinly veiled attack on the timber industry.

His 1983 “The Butter Battle Book” is a didactic tale of the Yooks and the Zooks, who have an inane disagreement and end up building increasingly complicated slingshots in their own private arms race.

“I enjoy making a statement, but I don’t think one has to always do so to feel worthwhile,” Geisel said. “I’ve never had a desire to save the world. My desire was simply to say something and express myself; to stimulate the brain cells of my readers and teach children something vitally important: to understand and appreciate the value of reading.”

Yet, on his deathbed, Geisel issued one final challenge, according to Neil Morgan, a close personal friend and editor of the Tribune in San Diego.

Morgan and his wife, writer Judith Morgan, had been tape-recording interviews with Geisel in recent months for a biography on the man and, having completed the oral history, asked Geisel if he had any final thoughts. Morgan said in an interview Wednesday:

“He smiled and said, ‘Let me think about it.’ Then he handed Judith a yellow piece of paper and scrawled this:

“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 U.S.A. would be, ‘We can . . . and we’ve got to . . . do better than this.’ ”


The Story of Dr. Seuss