DR. SEUSS (THEODOR GEISEL) (1904-1991)
by George Frein

When Dr. Seuss came on the scene in 1937 everybody knew what children’s books were supposed to do. They were to teach morality and good behavior. In other words they were to be thinly disguised sermons. That they were uninteresting seemed to go unnoticed. 

The author John Hersey noticed that when books came with illustrations they showed boys and girls who were “unnaturally clean, abnormally courteous, boring, and terribly literal.” Chief among these books were the widely used primers, Dick and Jane. No one seemed to notice either that children were not learning to read from such books. Why should they?

Dr. Seuss’ first book was rejected by 26 publishers because, they told him it “was too different from other children’s books,” “verse was not in vogue,” “fantasy was not salable,” and most of all it “had no moral or message.” Seuss asked, “What’s wrong with kids having fun reading without being preached at?” 

The 27th publisher accepted the book, And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which broke the mold for kid’s books with a series of wildly impossible parades “witnessed” by a boy on his way home from school. Seuss justified the boy’s story saying, “Kids exaggerate the same way I do.” Exaggeration became the leading feature of Seuss’ illustrations and stories. It made his stories fun. It made them true to life for children who seemed to know what adults had forgotten: that life is fantastic, that the world is bigger than anyone knows, and that people are animals who have “more fun than a barrel of monkeys.”

Seuss said all his animals were people. So it made sense for him to draw an elephant hearing voices, a cat in a hat, a fox in socks, Sneeches wearing stars on their bellies, a Grinch wrecking Christmas. His animals allowed Seuss to define man less as the “rational animal” of Aristotle and more as the “exaggerated animal” he was. Still school librarians rejected the idea of using his books to teach reading. Their reason: “His books are too jokey.” But ultimately they changed their minds and the American Library Association gave him an award for his “lasting contributions to children’s literature.”

Now that even librarians recognize the truth of Dr. Seuss’ exaggerations, it remains to ask what he was after in his writing. What did he hope to achieve? Fun, surely. But also something more, something he always told himself: “You can do better than this.” He added that if he were to leave any more words to kids they would be these: “We can . . . and we’ve got to . . . do better than this.” Dr Seuss understood that better is only good exaggerated, but that to get to better we have to break the mold that is merely good.  Thankfully, when Dr. Seuss broke the mold readers got, not wreckage, but the promise of a better world embodied in the fun exaggerations of his characters.

RECOMMENDED READING

Books by Dr. Seuss

If you read only one or two books from each decade of Dr. Seuss’ career read:

And to Think I saw It on Mulberry Street (1937)

Horton Hatches the Egg (1940)

Horton Hears a Who (1954)

On Beyond Zebra! (1955)

The Cat in the Hat (1957)

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957)

Green Eggs and Ham (1960), The Sneetches  (1961)

The Lorax (1971)

The Butter Battle Book (1984)

Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (1990)

Books about Dr. Seuss

Cohen, Charles D. The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss, A Visual Biography of Theodor Geisel. Random House, 2004.

Minear, Richard H. Dr. Seuss Goes to War, the World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel. The New Press, 2001.

Morgan, Judith and Neil. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel, a Biography. Da Capo Press, 1996.

Nel, Philip. Dr. Seuss: American Icon. Continuum, 2004.

Sofflet, Mary. Dr. Seuss from Then to Now: A Catalogue of the Retrospective Exhibition.  The San Diego Museum of Art, 1986.

GEORGE FREIN

Dr. George Frein taught in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Dakota from 1968 until he retired in 1997. He served as a scholar/performer for the Great Plains Chautauqua Society from 1986 to 1997, portraying Father De Smet, Henry Adams, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. When George moved to South Carolina in 1999, he helped establish Chautauqua there and in North Carolina. In the Carolinas, George’s characters have come to include John Adams, John Winthrop, John James Audubon, Abraham Lincoln, and now this year Dr. Seuss. George says that he does not suffer from multiple-personality syndrome; he rather enjoys the diversity.

DR. SEUSS

QUOTES

“If you don’t get imagination as a kid you probably never will.”

“America is turning into a third-rate nation because we can’t read.”

“Kids exaggerate the same way I do.”

“None of my animals have joints and none of them balance. And when it comes to that, none of them are animals. There’re all people.”

“The main reason that I picked ‘Seuss’ professionally is that I still thought I was one day going to write the Great American Novel. I was saving my real name for that – and it looks like I still am.”

“The kids I first wrote for are not old poops yet, but they have their feet in the door.” – Dr. Seuss at 80

TIMELINE
Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991)