“The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
All that cold, cold, wet day.
I sat there with Sally.
We sat there, we two.
And too cold to play ball.
So we sat in the house.
We did nothing at all.
And we did not like it.
Not one little bit.
Since 1957, these words that Dr. Seuss wrote have been read by millions of people around the world. Putting these words to paper and publishing them, Dr. Seuss had no idea that it would be one of the best loved and cherished children’s stories the world has ever seen. Dr. Seuss, whose first page of his book The Cat in the Hat was just read, is one of the most renowned children’s authors of all time. There are so many questions about him. Challenged to find out about Dr. Seuss, biographers all over America try desperately to find where he got inspiration or what he believed about life. In his books, does Dr. Seuss insert his own experiences or are they just nonsense stories? Some say he does and others say he doesn’t—sometimes people see things that aren’t there. So why did he write the stories he did?
Who is Dr. Seuss? The legendary children’s writer seems to some as though he popped out of the ground—and maybe he did—for all they know. He probably encouraged this idea. Raised creatively by his parents, Seuss, whose first name was Theodore, was telling stories as soon as he could talk. When he left for college he planned to be an English teacher, but soon found much more enjoyment in telling tales and making people laugh with his comics. Suddenly meeting and marrying the women of his dreams after only a short relationship, Dr. Seuss found what would be his one counselor whom he trusted completely. Though not very much information is known about this famous story teller, he had a very interesting life.
On March second, 1904, Theodore Seuss Geisel was born to Theodore and Henrietta Seuss in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was always called Ted. While growing up, he was always encouraged by his mother to draw continuously. She even allowed him to draw on the walls of his room and the walls of the attic. Critically watching his son draw, Ted’s father believed that his drawings were too cartoony and that they didn’t truly represent what real animals and people look like. Reading constantly, Ted’s favorite book was called The Hole Book, in which there is a story—all in rhythm—about a boy who shoots a gun and it ricochets off everything in his house until it is stopped by a very hard cake. He also may have been inspired by his books from his childhood called More Beasts for Worse Children
[i] where he seems to steal some creatures from.
When Ted graduated from high school, he immediately headed to Dartmouth College to work on a liberal arts degree. Quickly submitting comics to the humor magazine “Jack-O-Lantern,” which he soon became editor of, he quickly found success. He much preferred it to studying. In his senior year, he was caught partying the night before Easter with some friends and was fired from his chief editor position in the magazine, the only part of Dartmouth he actually enjoyed. However he still submitted comics as he finished off the year under a new alias, Dr. Seuss. Graduating from Dartmouth, Ted decided to attend Oxford to expand his studies, but when he arrived he couldn’t stand the English snobbery or the bland food in England. One day while Ted was sitting in class doodling during a lecture, a girl named Helen Palmer looked over his shoulder and said, “If I could do that, I wouldn’t be sitting in this class.” A few months later they were married and he had taken her advice and moved back to America to try and make a career of writing and drawing instead of continuing with college.
Moving back to America, Ted immediately set out to start a career. He began by advertising. Promptly finding an advertising job with the bug killing company FLIT, he successfully rose to the challenge. As soon as he started, Flit became famous for the slogan “Quick Henry the Flit” that Ted gave it, accompanied by his wild drawings of people battling and killing humanized insects with Flit. In 1937 Ted published his first children’s book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was an immediate success. The more children’s stories he wrote, the more popular he became. Jokingly challenging Ted to a bet, William Spaulding, the director of Houghton Mifflin’s educational division of Children’s books, said that he didn’t believe Seuss could write a book for new readers that contained exactly 225 words out of a possible 348 beginner’s word list and create a book that children would like. Ted rose to the challenge. On March 18, 1957, Dr. Seuss, who not only met all the requirements of the bet, published The Cat in the Hat, and its popularity spread by word of mouth immediately. Kids all over America were begging their parents to buy Ted’s book, which was the most fun book they had ever read.
Telling stories from a young age, Dr. Seuss always needed one thing—an audience—a listener to share and critique his ideas and drawings with. When he was a young boy, this role was usually filled by his mother; she listened, criticized, laughed at, and most importantly, encouraged the stories he told. This is where his genius lies. Suddenly finding himself void of listeners when he went off to college, Ted—who did not give up easily—found a new audience in the readers of the comic paper Jack-O-Lantern which he became the editor of until he left for
[ii]Oxford where his new listener was his soon to be wife, Helen Palmer. She would become his only trusted adviser for the next forty years. In his years of writing he was always asked, “You write children’s books, but why don’t you have any kids of your own?” and his answer was “You make ‘em, I’ll entertain ‘em.” Dr. Seuss did not just love telling stories, he loved telling stories to people.
Curiously searching for where Dr. Seuss inspiration came from, people were always asking him where he pulled his ideas from. Whenever he was asked, his stock answer for over a decade was usually:
“I get my ideas my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka pass
[iii]. There is a little town called Gletch, and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a smaller hamlet called Uber Gletch. I go there on the fourth of August every summer to get my cuckoo clock repaired. While the cuckoo is in the hospital, I wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange people, and I get my ideas from them.”
Elaborating his story of Horton in the tree, his final version of the tale was that late one night two pieces of paper blew through the window and landed on the table on top of each other—an elephant on a tree. As long as it was a good story—and it always was--he didn’t care if it was historically correct. He also often added in political and moral ideas and his own experiences into his stories which have sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant, morals.
When Seuss was at a party once, another writer told him that it was a pity that Seuss never wrote anything political. Unexpectedly receiving a package from Seuss a month later, the same writer curiously opened it to find a copy of Marvin K. Moody Wiill You Please Go Now, which had the name Marvin crossed out and replaced with Richard N. Nixon. During World War II, he also did many comics for the war. In his book Yertle the Turtle, Seuss based Yertle, the ruthless power hungry king of the turtles, off of Hitler. His most obviously political book, however, is The Butter Battle Book. Living on either side of a wall, the zooks on one side only eat their bread butter side up, while the zooks on the other side eat their bread butter side down. In the end of the book, both sides are poised to bomb the other side into oblivion over a small political matter of breakfast food.
When Dr. Seuss wrote, he always pulled things from his past or present life. In his first book, he used Mulberry
[iv] Street, which was a street he lived a few blocks away from and walked on quite often as a child. Groggily looking in the mirror one winter morning, Seuss said that he had gradually become a very “grinchy”
[v] person, and so he wrote—with great deliberation--what is now one of the most famous Christmas stories in the world, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His most famous character shows him best. Dr. Seuss always said he had a soft spot for cats, and then came The Cat in the Hat. Some say that Seuss wasn’t creating a character; he was just tweaking and exaggerating himself with his tall lanky figure, charming smile, and ability to make people laugh.
Although Dr. Seuss loved to slip and sneak morals into his stories, some people have gone too far in analyzing his work. In The Cat in the Hat, the bathtub rings, which are spread around the house, were wrongly accused of being a protest to against the spread of the red menace. When asked about these analyses, Dr. Seuss said, “I think they’re a waste of time…. For example, they’ll take a book of mine that has one color in it and talk about my great sensitivity in handling that color and why I chose that color, when the fact is that Bennett Cerf called me up one morning and said, ‘We’re having a bit of a financial problem, so cut down your colors.’” Reading How the Grinch stole Christmas, many people came to totally misunderstand Seuss and think that he did not believe in turning his famous and lovable characters into consumer goods. This is not true. Completely open to the idea of making money, as Charles D. Cohen says in his book The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss, “Dr. Seuss had no problems milking his characters for everything they were worth.” Some people just don’t understand the way he puts in his morals.
Quietly slipping in morals throughout his books, Dr. Seuss has created many of the well-known sayings today, such as “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” In the Sneetches, he spoke about equality, in The Lorax he talked about the environment, and in Horton and the Egg he undertones about keeping promises. Writing his stories first and letting the morals come naturally, Dr. Seuss, who hated when a story was written around a moral, knew from his own experience as a kid that kids can easily spot a moral a mile off, and that it immediately strips the story of all its fun. When he wrote, his beliefs and experiences just seeped through his brain and landed on the paper amidst the tale he was spinning, whether it was political or just a regular memories. He had very strong beliefs on certain subjects.
Subtly slipping in his ideas, Dr. Seuss had a very sly way of stating what he thought about things. Attending the colleges and having the opportunities he did definitely affected his book writing later on in life. Throughout his marriage, his wife, who was always there to hear what he had to say on everything, was always ready to give her opinion. Whenever he told stories he always had an audience, whether it was millions of people across America, his mother, his wife, or a stranger passing on the street. He loved telling people stories. His most important feature was how he brought his life, his ideas, his views, and his words together to create excitingly wonderful stories that people love and will love for ever. Dr. Seuss was a master story teller.
[i]
More Beasts for worse children was a book of stories written by Hilaire Belloc,
to scare naughty children into listening to their parents
[ii]
Oxford: a famous college in England
[iv]
Mulberry Street: a thoroughfare in Manhattan New York.
[v]
Grinchy: based off the character of the Grinch, who did not like Christmas
Bibliography:
Cohen, D. Cohen. The Seuss The Whole Seuss And Nothing But
The Seuss. New York: Random House, 2004
Pease, Donald E. Theodore Seuss Geisel. Oxford: University
Press,2010.
Weidt, Maryann N. Oh, The Places He Went. Minneapolis, Carolrhoda books, Inc..
