When was Dr. Seuss born and where did he grow up?

Theodor Seuss Geisel was born on the 2nd of March 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, into a family of German descent that faced anti-German prejudice during World War I.

What pen name did Theodor Seuss Geisel use for his children's books?

Theodor Seuss Geisel used the pen name Seuss for his work. He began signing his work with this name in 1927 to continue contributing to the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern magazine after being punished for drinking gin.

How many books did Dr. Seuss write and how many copies did he sell?

Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote more than 60 books over the course of his career. He sold over 600 million copies of his books, which were translated into more than 20 languages.

What awards did Dr. Seuss receive during his lifetime?

Theodor Seuss Geisel won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his contribution to the education and enjoyment of America's children. He also received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal in 1980 and an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from Whittier College in 1980.

Which Dr. Seuss books address social and political issues?

Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote books that address social and political issues such as The Lorax about environmentalism and The Sneetches about racial equality. He also wrote The Butter Battle Book about the arms race and Yertle the Turtle about anti-authoritarianism.

Dr. Seuss: the story on HearLore

Q: When did Dr. Seuss die and where are his ashes scattered?

Theodor Seuss Geisel died of cancer on the 24th of September 1991 at his home in the La Jolla community of San Diego. His ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

Theodor Seuss Geisel was born on the 2nd of March 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts, into a family of German descent that would soon face the harsh realities of World War I. His father managed a family brewery, but Prohibition forced the business to close, leading his father to take over the supervision of Springfield's public park system. Young Geisel and his sister Marnie experienced anti-German prejudice from other children, a formative experience that would later inform his understanding of exclusion and prejudice. Raised as a Missouri Synod Lutheran, Geisel attended Dartmouth College, where he joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and the humor magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern. His time at Dartmouth was marked by a significant infraction: he was caught drinking gin with nine friends in his room, a violation of Prohibition laws. As punishment, Dean Craven Laycock insisted that Geisel resign from all extracurricular activities, including the Jack-O-Lantern. To continue working on the magazine without the administration's knowledge, Geisel began signing his work with the pen name Seuss, a name that would eventually become synonymous with children's literature. He was encouraged in his writing by professor of rhetoric W. Benfield Pressey, whom he described as his big inspiration for writing at Dartmouth.

Geisel left Oxford without earning a degree and returned to the United States in February 1927, where he immediately began submitting writings and drawings to magazines, book publishers, and advertising agencies. His first nationally published cartoon appeared in the 16th of July 1927, issue of The Saturday Evening Post, a single sale of $25 that encouraged Geisel to move from Springfield to New York City. Later that year, Geisel accepted a job as writer and illustrator at the humor magazine Judge, and he felt financially stable enough to marry Helen Palmer on the 29th of November 1927. In early 1928, one of Geisel's cartoons for Judge mentioned Flit, a common bug spray at the time manufactured by Standard Oil of New Jersey. The campaign's catchphrase Quick, Henry, the Flit! became a part of popular culture, spawning a song and being used as a punch line for comedians such as Fred Allen and Jack Benny. As Geisel gained fame for the Flit campaign, his work was in demand and began to appear regularly in magazines such as Life, Liberty and Vanity Fair. The money Geisel earned from his advertising work and magazine submissions made him wealthier than even his most successful Dartmouth classmates, allowing the Geisels to move to better quarters and to socialize in higher social circles. They became friends with the wealthy family of banker Frank A. Vanderlip and traveled extensively, visiting 30 countries together by 1936.

As World War II began, Geisel turned to political cartoons, drawing over 400 in two years as editorial cartoonist for the left-leaning New York City daily newspaper, PM. Geisel's political cartoons, later published in Dr. Seuss Goes to War, denounced Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and were highly critical of non-interventionists, such as Charles Lindbergh, who opposed US entry into the war. One cartoon depicted Japanese Americans being handed TNT in anticipation of a signal from home, while other cartoons deplored the racism at home against Jews and blacks that harmed the war effort. In 1942, Geisel turned his energies to direct support of the U.S. war effort, working drawing posters for the Treasury Department and the War Production Board. Then, in 1943, he joined the Army as a captain and was commander of the Animation Department of the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces, where he wrote films that included Your Job in Germany, a 1945 propaganda film about peace in Europe after World War II, and the Private Snafu series of adult army training films. While in the Army, he was awarded the Legion of Merit. Our Job in Japan became the basis for the commercially released film Design for Death, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, and Gerald McBoing-Boing, based on an original story by Seuss, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

After the war, Geisel and his wife moved to the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, where he returned to writing children's books. In May 1954, Life published a report on illiteracy among school children which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. William Ellsworth Spaulding, the director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin, compiled a list of 348 words that he felt were important for first-graders to recognize. He asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and to write a book using only those words. Spaulding challenged Geisel to bring back a book children can't put down. Nine months later, Geisel completed The Cat in the Hat, using 236 of the words given to him. It retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Geisel's earlier works but, because of its simplified vocabulary, it could be read by beginning readers. The Cat in the Hat and subsequent books written for young children achieved significant international success and they remain very popular today. For example, in 2009, Green Eggs and Ham sold 540,000 copies, The Cat in the Hat sold 452,000 copies, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish sold 409,000 copies, all outselling the majority of newly published children's books. Geisel went on to write many other children's books, both in his new simplified-vocabulary manner and in his older, more elaborate style.

Geisel's wife Helen had a long struggle with illnesses. On the 23rd of October 1967, Helen died by suicide. On the 5th of August 1968, Geisel married Audrey Dimond with whom he had reportedly been having an affair. Although he devoted most of his life to writing children's books, Geisel had no children of his own, saying of children: You have 'em; I'll entertain 'em. Audrey added that Geisel lived his whole life without children and he was very happy without children. Audrey oversaw Geisel's estate until her death on the 19th of December 2018, at the age of 97. Geisel was awarded an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from Whittier College in 1980 and received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the professional children's librarians in 1980, recognizing his substantial and lasting contributions to children's literature. He won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1984 citing his contribution over nearly half a century to the education and enjoyment of America's children and their parents. In 1985, Geisel received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Princeton University for showing children the way to the adult world, as he shows adults the way to the child.

Geisel died of cancer on the 24th of September 1991, at his home in the La Jolla community of San Diego at the age of 87. His ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean. On the 1st of December 1995, four years after his death, University of California, San Diego's University Library Building was renamed Geisel Library in honor of Geisel and Audrey for the generous contributions that they made to the library and their devotion to improving literacy. In 2002, the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden opened in Springfield, Massachusetts, featuring sculptures of Geisel and of many of his characters. In 2017, the Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum opened next to the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden in the Springfield Museums Quadrangle. In 2008, Dr. Seuss was inducted into the California Hall of Fame. In 2004, U.S. children's librarians established the annual Theodor Seuss Geisel Award to recognize the most distinguished American book for beginning readers published in English in the United States during the preceding year. It should demonstrate creativity and imagination to engage children in reading from pre-kindergarten to second grade. At Dartmouth College, incoming first-year students participate in pre-matriculation trips run by the Dartmouth Outing Club, eating green eggs and ham for breakfast at the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. On the 4th of April 2012, the Dartmouth Medical School was renamed the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine in honor of their many years of generosity to the College. Dr. Seuss has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at the 6500 block of Hollywood Boulevard. In 2012, a crater on the planet Mercury was named after Geisel.

Geisel made a point of not beginning to write his stories with a moral in mind, stating that kids can see a moral coming a mile off. He was not against writing about issues, however, and he remarked that he was subversive as hell. Geisel's books express his views on a wide variety of social and political issues: The Lorax, about environmentalism and anti-consumerism; The Sneetches, about racial equality; The Butter Battle Book, about the arms race; Yertle the Turtle, about Adolf Hitler and anti-authoritarianism; How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, criticizing the economic materialism and consumerism of the Christmas season; and Horton Hears a Who!, about anti-isolationism and internationalism. Geisel's political cartoons portrayed the fear of communism as overstated, finding greater threats in the House Committee on Unamerican Activities and those who threatened to cut the U.S.'s life line to the USSR and Stalin, whom he once depicted as a porter carrying our war load. Geisel supported the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in order to prevent possible sabotage, but after the war, Geisel overcame his feelings of animosity and his view, using his book Horton Hears a Who! as an allegory for the American post-war occupation of Japan, as well as dedicating the book to a Japanese friend. Geisel converted a copy of one of his famous children's books, Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!, into a polemic shortly before the end of the 1972, 1974 Watergate scandal, by replacing the name of the main character everywhere that it occurred, creating Richard M. Nixon, Will You Please Go Now!.

Geisel wrote more than 60 books over the course of his long career, selling over 600 million copies and being translated into more than 20 languages. His books have topped many bestseller lists, and in 2000, Publishers Weekly compiled a list of the best-selling children's books of all time, of the top 100 hardcover books, 16 were written by Geisel, including Green Eggs and Ham at number 4, The Cat in the Hat at number 9, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish at number 13. In the years after his death in 1991, two additional books were published based on his sketches and notes: Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! and Daisy-Head Mayzie. My Many Colored Days was originally written in 1973 but was posthumously published in 1996. In September 2011, seven stories originally published in magazines during the 1950s were released in a collection titled The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories. Geisel's early artwork often employed the shaded texture of pencil drawings or watercolors, but in his children's books of the postwar period, he generally made use of a starker medium, pen and ink, normally using just black, white, and one or two colors. His later books, such as The Lorax, used more colors. Geisel's style was unique, his figures often rounded and somewhat droopy, and almost all his buildings and machinery were devoid of straight lines when they were drawn. Geisel's illustrations often convey motion vividly, and he was fond of a sort of voila gesture in which the hand flips outward and the fingers spread slightly backward with the thumb up. Geisel's books and characters are featured in Seuss Landing, one of many islands at the Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando, Florida, where there are reportedly no straight lines in Seuss Landing.

Dr. Seuss

From Advertising To Art

The War Years And The Pen

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Common questions

The Cat In The Hat Challenge

Personal Turmoil And Public Life

The Final Years And Legacy

The Subversive Artist

The Enduring Imagination