PLEASE MENTION IN&AROUND WHEN CONTACTING ADVERTISERS
It's Dr. Seuss's birthday. That is truer than true!
This month is that of the birth of the much-loved children’s author and illustrator Dr. Seuss. The man with the real name of Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on 2 March, 1904. Before his death at the age of 87 in 1991, he wrote over 60 children’s books, more than 600 million copies of which have been sold. Many children of today could still rejoice in the silliness, experimental language and touching moral lessons of the work he has left behind.
The early pre-war works
There was a strong German presence in Seuss’s ancestry, all of his grandparents having emigrated from Germany. His boyhood home was on Fairfield Street, under a mile away from Mulberry Street, which Seuss later immortalised in his earliest children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. That was published in 1937, following rejections by several publishers - and Geisel penned another four books before the United States’ entry into World War II. Those books included the prose works The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins in 1938 and The Seven Lady Godivas and The King’s Stilts the following year. Nonetheless, his first book had been a poetic work - and it was with 1940’s Horton Hatches the Egg that he returned to poetry, the literary genre with which he would become most strongly associated.
From children’s writer to political cartoonist
During World War II, much of Geisel’s work had a much more political 6 | IN&AROUND
flavour. In the space of just two years, he drew more than 400 political cartoons as editorial cartoonist for the New York City newspaper PM. Those cartoons much later, in 1999, saw publication in Dr. Seuss Goes to War. The cartoons attacked Hitler and Mussolini and also opened fire at non-interventionists who believed that the US should not enter the war.
Oh, the places you’ll go as a Dr. Seuss reader
Following the war, Geisel resumed working on children’s books. The classics that he wrote during his very productive post-war period included 1950’s If I Ran the Zoo, 1956’s If I Ran the Circus and 1960’s Green Eggs and Ham. This period also saw him produce three books which, in the twenty-first century, have all been adapted for cinema: 1955’s Horton Hears a Who!, 1957’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas and, of course, The Cat in the Hat, which was published in the same year. The Cat in the Hat has especially intriguing origins. In 1954, Life magazine reported that schoolchildren were suffering in their literacy due to the dull books which they were given to read. William Ellsworth Spaulding, who directed the education division of publishing company Houghton Mifflin, listed hundreds of words which he deemed crucial for children to recognise. He then asked Geisel to write a genuinely interesting book which used 250 of these words. The resulting book by Seuss used 236 of the words given to him. Wonderfully imaginative but also suited to novice readers, The Cat in the Hat became a big international hit.