Dr. Seuss

Theodor Seuss Geisel, known to generations of readers as Dr. Seuss, was an American children’s author, illustrator, animator, and cartoonist. He was born on March 2, 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and died on September 24, 1991. Over a career that reached from magazine cartoons and advertising into children’s books, political cartoons, animation, and film, he wrote and illustrated more than 60 books under his famous pen name. By the time of his death, those books had sold more than 600 million copies and had been translated into more than 20 languages.

Geisel grew up in Springfield, the son of Theodor Robert Geisel and Henrietta Geisel, née Seuss. His father managed the family brewery and later supervised Springfield’s public park system after the brewery closed because of Prohibition. A real Springfield street near Geisel’s boyhood home, Mulberry Street, later appeared in the title of his first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, published in 1937. His family was of German descent, and Geisel and his sister Marnie faced anti-German prejudice from other children after the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He was raised as a Missouri Synod Lutheran and remained in that denomination throughout his life.

At Dartmouth College, where he graduated in 1925, Geisel joined Sigma Phi Epsilon and worked on the humor magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, becoming editor-in-chief. After he was caught drinking gin with friends during Prohibition, he was ordered to leave extracurricular activities. To keep contributing to the magazine without the administration’s knowledge, he began signing his work “Seuss.” He was also encouraged by rhetoric professor W. Benfield Pressey, whom he later described as his “big inspiration for writing” at Dartmouth. At Lincoln College, Oxford, he intended to earn a D.Phil. in English literature, but Helen Palmer, his future wife, urged him to pursue drawing instead. She had noticed that his notebooks were filled with “fabulous animals.”

Geisel left Oxford without a degree in 1927 and returned to the United States, where he began submitting writings and drawings to magazines, publishers, and advertising agencies. His first nationally published cartoon appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on July 16, 1927. Later that year he took a job at the humor magazine Judge, married Helen Palmer, and soon published work signed “Dr. Seuss.” His advertising career grew through the Flit campaign for Standard Oil of New Jersey, whose catchphrase “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” became part of popular culture. He also worked for publications such as Life, Liberty, and Vanity Fair, and illustrated campaigns for Standard Oil products, Ford Motor Company, NBC Radio Network, and Holly Sugar.

After publishing And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Geisel stepped away from children’s literature during World War II to draw political cartoons and work in the animation and film department of the United States Army. After the war, he returned to children’s books and produced many of his best-known titles, including If I Ran the Zoo in 1950, Horton Hears a Who! in 1954, The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1957, Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish in 1960, The Sneetches and Other Stories in 1961, The Lorax in 1971, The Butter Battle Book in 1984, and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! in 1990.

His books led to eleven television specials, five feature films, a Broadway musical, and four television series. He received Primetime Emmy Awards for Halloween Is Grinch Night in 1978 and The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat in 1982, and in 1984 he received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. His birthday, March 2, became the annual date for National Read Across America Day, a reading initiative created by the National Education Association. For a quotes site, his appeal is easy to understand: his work stayed close to childhood wonder, memory, and feeling. One line often shared under his name says, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” That note of brightness is still part of why readers return to Dr. Seuss.