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Dr. Seuss

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Biography

Recent Role:
Himself on The Dick Cavett Show
Gender:
Male
Born:
3-2-1904
Died:
9-24-1991 (Jaw Cancer (La Jolla, California, USA))
Birthplace:
Springfield, Massachusetts
Birth Name:
Theodor Seuss Geisel
AKA:
Ted Geisel, Theodor S. Geisel, Theodor Seuss, Theo LeSieg, The Kaiser
Now that generations of readers have been reared on The Cat in the Hat and Fox in Socks, it's easy to forget how colorless most children's books were before Dr. Seuss reinvented the genre. When the editorial cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1936, the book was turned down by 27 publishers, many of whom said it was "too different." Geisel was about to burn his manuscript when it was rescued and published, under the pen name Dr. Seuss, by a college classmate.

Over the next two decades, Geisel concocted such delightfully loopy

… More tales as The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and Horton Hears a Who. Most of his books earned excellent reviews, and three received Caldecott Honor Awards. But it was the 1957 publication of The Cat in the Hat that catapulted Geisel to celebrity.

Rudolf Flesch's book Why Johnny Can't Read, along with a related Life magazine article, had recently charged that children's primers were too pallid and bland to inspire an interest in reading. The Cat in the Hat, written with 220 words from a first-grade vocabulary list, "worked like a karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane and Spot," as Ellen Goodman wrote in The Detroit Free Press. With its vivid illustrations, rhyming text and topsy-turvy plot, Geisel's book for beginning readers was anything but bland. It sold nearly a million copies within three years.

Geisel was named president of Beginner Books, a new venture of Random House, where he worked with writers and artists like P.D. Eastman, Michael Frith, Al Perkins, and Roy McKie, some of whom collaborated with him on book projects. For books he wrote but didn't illustrate, Geisel used the pen name Theo LeSieg (LeSieg is Geisel spelled backwards).

As Dr. Seuss, he continued to write bestsellers. Some, like Green Eggs and Ham and the tongue-twisting Fox in Socks, were aimed at beginning readers. Others could be read by older children or read aloud by parents, who were often as captivated as their kids by Geisel's wit and imagination. Geisel's visual style appealed to television and film directors, too: The animator Chuck Jones, who had worked with Geisel on a series of Army training films, brought How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to life as a hugely popular animated TV special in 1966. A live-action movie starring Jim Carrey as the Grinch was released in 2000.

Many Dr. Seuss stories have serious undertones: The Butter Battle Book, for example, parodies the nuclear arms race. But whether he was teaching vocabulary words or values, Geisel never wrote plodding lesson books. All his stories are animated by a lively sense of visual and verbal play. At the time of his death in 1991, his books had sold more than 200 million copies. Bennett Cerf, Geisel's publisher, liked to say that of all the distinguished authors he had worked with, only one was a genius: Dr. Seuss.

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  •  
    10 Perfect
    One of the best book writters of all time. hide show

    Dr. Seuss has made alot of good books. When I was little, my parents used to read me Dr. Seuss books all the time and I really enjoyed them. He's made some hilarious ones like 'One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish' and my favorite of his books has always been 'Green Eggs and Ham'. 'The Cat and the Hat' is a funny one too since of how the Cat likes to do funny stuff and 'The Cat in the Hat Comes Back' is a good sequel to it. The animated versions of his books that where on Fox Kids where pretty good too but I still prefer the books over them since they seem funnier. I used to have the computer story book games to 'Green Eggs and Ham' and 'The Cat in the Hat' and they where fun to play. They had mini games and fun things happened when when you clicked on things on storybook pages just like any other storybook computer game. Anyway, I recently found the Dr. Seuss books I had when I was little and I read them and they brought back memories. As a teen, I still really enjoy reading them since they are so funny and enjoyable.

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    PPG-Katelyn Added Aug 8, 2008 All my reviews
  •  
    10 Perfect
    He has written some of the best children books ever hide show

    Like i just said Dr. Seuss has written some of the best children books ever. Such as The cat in the cat, how the grinch stole christmas, the fish book,and much more. The movies for his books were good. Every book he wrote had rymth threw all the pages. The most of been hard to do. Also all of his books had a lesson behind it. And thats why he is one of the all time greats.

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    Water78 Added Aug 18, 2006 All my reviews
 

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