March 2nd: Dr Seuss

Author Theodore Geisel ("Dr. Suess") was born on this date in 1904. Here are some things you may not know about him.

1. His real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel.
2. His pen name, Dr. Seuss came about while he was at university. He was caught drinking gin with some friends in his room, a serious misdemeanour since it was during prohibition. His punishment was that he was forced to resign from all his extracurricular activities, including contributing to the college magazine. He continued to do so on the sly by signing his work with his middle name, Seuss.
3. He added the “Dr.” to his pen name because his father had always wanted him to practice medicine.
4. Later, he went to study at Oxford University with the intention of becoming an English teacher. He met a woman there called Helen Palmer, who encouraged him to pursue a career in drawing instead. He left Oxford in 1927 to become an illustrator. Once he'd got a regular writing an illustrating job with a humour magazine called Judge, he and Helen married.
5. His first children's book was And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, published in 1937. Geisel himself claimed the book was rejected by as many as 43 publishers and that as he walked home from the last one, he'd resolved to burn the manuscript. On that walk he bumped into an old friend from college, an encounter which led to the book finally being published by Vanguard Press.
6. He published over 60 books, including The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His books have been adapted into 11 television specials, four feature films, a Broadway musical, and four television series.
7. Although known for children's books, he never had any children of his own. "You have 'em; I'll entertain 'em," he said. His second wife, Audrey Stone Dimond, said that he was perfectly happy being child free. He travelled a lot, believing that travel helped his creativity.
8. Geisel also wrote about more serious, grown up topics. During World War II, he worked in an animation department of the United States Army and produced several short films, including Design for Death, which won the 1947 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. He also drew political cartoons denouncing Hitler and Mussolini.
9. The Cat in the Hat came about after a Life magazine report about how children weren't learning to read because their books were boring. William Ellsworth Spaulding, director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin, challenged Geisel to come up with a book children would not be able to put down, using no more than 250 simple words. Geisel rose to the challenge and produced the book, using only 236 words. He made a point of not moralising in his books, because "kids can see a moral coming a mile off," but believed that every story has a moral in it somewhere.
10. Geisel's birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the date for National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association.

Related posts:

Dr Seuss Quotes
Quotes about Reading (Read Across America Day)

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