Dr. Seuss

At 87 years old, Dr. Seuss has this physical status:

Theodor Seuss Geisel (listen), born in 1904 and died on September 24, 1991) was an American children's author, illustrator, sculptor, animator, screenwriter, and film critic.

He is best known for his writing and illustrating more than 60 books under the pen name Doctor Seuss (abbreviated Dr. ), abbreviated Dr.

(Seuss)

His book "Dr. Rocco" was one of the most popular children's books of all time, selling over 600 million copies and translating into more than 20 languages by the time of his death.

Seuss "as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College and as a graduate student at Lincoln College, Oxford.

In 1927, he began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist for Vanity Fair, Life, and several other journals.

He also served as an illustrator for ad agencies, most notably for FLIT and Standard Oil, and as a political cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM.

On Mulberry Street in 1937, he published his first children's book And to Think That I Saw It.

Geisel returned to writing children's books, producing or animating several films during World War II, including Design for Death, which later won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. (1955) If I Ran the Circus (1956) If I Ran the Hat (1957) How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957) and Green Eggs and Ham (1960).

During his career, he produced more than 60 books, including 11 television specials, five feature films, a Broadway musical, and four television series. In 1958 for Horton Hatches the Egg and again in 1961 for And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, Geisel received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.

Geisel's birthday, March 2, has been set as the annual date for National Read Across America Day, the National Education Association's initiative on reading.

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Life and career

Geisel was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, as the son of Henrietta (née Seuss) and Theodor Robert Geisel. Since the brewery closed due to Prohibition, his father supervised the family brewery and was later appointed by Mayor John A. Denison to oversee Springfield's public park system. Mulberry Street in Springfield, who wrote And to Believe That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, is just south of his boyhood home on Fairfield Street, and he made it famous in his first children's book And to Think That You Saw It on Mulberry Street. Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Geisel and his sister Marnie developed anti-German phobia in the family. Geisel was raised as a Lutheran in Missouri, and remained in the faith for the remainder of his life.

Geisel attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1925. He joined Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and the humor magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, eventually rising to the rank of editor-in-chief at Dartmouth. He was discovered gin with nine people in his room when he was at Dartmouth. Under Prohibition laws, which remained in force from 1920 to 1933, smoking and drinking alcohol was unlawful. Geisel resigned from all extracurricular activities, including the Jack-O-Lantern, as a result of this offense, Dean Craven Laycock demanded that Geisel resign from all extracurricular sports, including the Jack-O-Lantern. Geisel began writing without the administration's knowledge, and he began to publish with the pen name "Seuss." He was encouraged in his writing by W. Benfield Pressey, a rhetoric professor who referred to him as his "great inspiration for writing" at Dartmouth.

After graduating from Dartmouth, he registered at Lincoln College, Oxford, with the intention of earning a Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.) In English literature, there is no such thing as a poet. Helen Palmer, his future wife, who advised him not to become an English tutor in favour of studying drawing as a profession, was a pleasure at Oxford. "Ted's notebooks were always packed with these wonderful creatures," she said later. I set to work diverting him; here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should be earning a living doing it."

In February 1927, Geisel left Oxford without a degree and returned to the United States, where he began submitting stories and drawings to journals, book publishers, and advertising companies. He pitched Eminent Europeans to Life magazine, but the magazine turned down the project, using his time in Europe. In the Saturday Evening Post's July 16, 1927, issue, his first nationally published cartoon appeared. Geisel was able to move from Springfield to New York City thanks to a single $25 auction. Geisel took up writing and illustration for the humor magazine Judge later this year, and he loved Palmer enough to marry her. On October 22, 1927, his first cartoon for Judge was published, and Geisel and Palmer were married on November 29. "Dr. Seuss," Geisel's first book, was published in Judge just six months after he began working there.

Flit, a common bug spray produced by Standard Oil of New Jersey in early 1928, was one of Geisel's cartoons for Judge. Geisel's cartoon at a hairdresser's house was seen by Geisel, the wife of an advertising executive in charge of marketing Flit, who begged her husband to sign him. The first Fle ad of Geisel appeared on May 31, 1928, 1928, and the campaign went on sporadically until 1941. "Quick, Henry, the Flit," the campaign's catchphrase says. Popular culture has made it a part. It spawned a song and was used as a punch line for comedians like Fred Allen and Jack Benny. His work was in demand as Geisel's campaign became well-known, and he began to appear in Life, Liberty, and Vanity Fair journals regularly.

Geisel's earnings from his advertising work and magazine submissions made him richer than even his most popular Dartmouth classmates. The Geisels were able to move to higher quarters and socialize in more social circles as a result of their increased income. They became friends with banker Frank A. Vanderlip's wealthy family. They'd also traveled extensively: Geisel and his wife had visited 30 countries together by 1936. They didn't have children, nor did regular office hours, and they had a lot of money. Geisel also found that traveling inspired his creativity.

Geisel's success with the Flit campaign culminated in more advertisement work for Standard Oil products such as Essomarine boat fuel and Essolube Motor Oil, as well as other businesses such as the Ford Motor Company, NBC Radio Network, and Holly Sugar. Boners, a series of children's sayings that he illustrated, was the first book foray into books by Viking Press in 1931. It debuted on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list and lead to a sequel, More Boners, which came out the same year. Geisel wrote and illustrated an ABC book about "very strange animals" that were unlikely to interest publishers, despite the books' success and positive critical reception.

Geisel and his wife were returning from an ocean voyage to Europe in 1936, when the ship's engines inspired the poem that became his first children's book: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. The book was rejected by between 20 and 43 publishers based on Geisel's various accounts. Geisel was walking home to burn the book when Vanguard Press announced it after a chance meeting with an old Dartmouth classmate. Before World War II, Geisel wrote four more books. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins were discovered in 1938, as well as The King's Stilts and The Seven Lady Godivas, which were all in prose, atypically for him. In 1940, Horton Hatches the Egg, which Geisel returned to verse in which Geisel returned to the use of verse.

Geisel, a liberal cartoonist for the left-leaning New York City daily newspaper, became a political cartoonist as World War II started. Prime Minister Paul Geisel returned to political cartoons, drawing over 400 people in two years. Geisel's political cartoons, which were later published in Dr. Seuss Goes to War, condemned Hitler and Mussolini and were extremely critical of non-interventionists ("isolationists"), especially Charles Lindbergh, who opposed the United States' entry into war. According to one cartoon, Japanese Americans were given TNT as a "signal from home," while other cartoons condemned the bigotry at home against Jews and blacks that endangered the war effort. His cartoons were largely supportive of President Roosevelt's handling of the conflict, combing the traditional exhortations to ration and support the war effort with regular attacks on Congress (particularly the Republican Party), portions of the Washington Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Times-Herald), and others for condemning Soviet Union involvement, investigation of suspected Communists, and other crimes that he accused of aiding disunity and aiding the Nazis, whether intentionally or inadvertently.

Geisel channeled his energies to direct support of the US war effort in 1942. He began designing posters for the Treasury Department and the War Production Board, first. In 1943, then joined the Army as a captain and was commander of the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces, where he produced films including Your Job in Germany, a 1945 propaganda film about peace in Europe following World War II; Our Town in Japan; and the Private Snafu series of adult army training films. The Legion of Merit was given to him while serving in the Army. Our jobs in Japan provided the basis for the commercially released film Design for Death (1947), a study of Japanese history that received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film. Gerald McBoing (1950) was based on Seuss' original tale and received the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

Geisel and his wife married in San Diego, California, where he returned to writing children's books. He published the majority of his books through Random House in North America and William Collins, Sons (later HarperCollins) internationally. Many writers, including 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 (1958). (1957) and Green Eggs and Ham (1960). He has received several awards throughout his career, but he did not win neither the Caldecott Medal nor the Newbery Medal. However, three of his titles from this period were not chosen as Caldecott Honor books (now referred to as Caldecott Honor books): McElligot's Pool (1947), Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949), and If I Ran the Zoo (1950). The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., a musical and fantasy film that was released in 1953, was also written by Dr. Seuss. The film was a critical and financial loss, and Geisel never attempted another feature film. He also published a number of illustrated short stories in the 1950s, mainly in Redbook magazine. Some of these stories were later collected (in volumes such as The Sneetches and Other Stories) or reworked into standalone books (If I Ran the Zoo). Since being first published, a number have never been reprinted.

A study on illiteracy among schoolchildren in May 1954 concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. William Ellsworth Spaulding, the former head of Houghton Mifflin's education department, compiled a list of 348 words that he thought were important for first-graders to recognize. He asked Geisel to reduce the list to 250 words and to write a book using only those words. Spaulding pleaded with Geisel to "bring a book that children can't read." Geisel completed The Cat in the Hat nine months later, using 236 of the words given to him. It maintained Geisel's earlier books' drawing style, poem rhythms, and all the creative vigour of Geisel's earlier works, but beginning readers could read it in a simplified style. The Cat in the Hat and subsequent books written for young children have received a lot of international recognition, and they are still very popular today. For example, Green Eggs and Ham sold 540,000 copies in 2009, The Cat in the Hat sold 452,000 copies, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (1960) sold 409,000 copies, outselling the majority of newly published children's books.

Geisel went on to write several other children's books, both in his new simplified-vocabulary style (sold as Beginner Books) and in his older, more elaborate style.

Dartmouth gave Geisel an honorary doctorate of Human Letters in 1955, with the following citation:

Geisel chuckled that he'd now have to sign "Dr. Seuss." His wife was sick at the time, so he delayed accepting it until June 1956.

Geisel appeared on an episode of the panel game show To Tell the Truth, on April 28, 1958.

Helen Geisel's mother had been suffering from illness for a long time. Helen died by suicide on October 23, 1967; Geisel married Audrey Dimond on June 21, 1968. "You have 'em; I'll entertain 'em," Geisel said of children, although he devoted the bulk of his life to writing children's books. Geisel "lived his whole life without children," Dimond said, and was "very content without children." Audrey oversaw Geisel's estate until her death on December 19, 2018, at the age of 97.

Geisel was given an honorary doctorate of Human Letters (L.H.D.). In 1980, Whittier College was founded. In 1980, he received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the professional children's librarians, recognizing his "continuous and lasting contributions to children's literature." It was awarded every five years at the time. In 1984, he received a special Pulitzer Prize for his contribution "to the education and enjoyment of America's children and their parents."

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