In this blog post, I want to share several little known stories I learned from reading and studying about the life of Theodor Seuss Geisel, or Dr. Seuss, as he is known to millions around the world. I recently finished an excellent biography by Brian Jay Jones entitled Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination.
This book is an incredible look inside the life of a fascinating individual who defined the reading of children over the years as he wrote and illustrated classics such as The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
“At the time of his death, Dr. Seuss had published forty-eight books in more than twenty languages….” (Becoming Dr. Seuss, p. 428) and had sold more than 600 million copies of books. His books were adapted into 11 television specials, five feature films, a Broadway musical and four television series.
You can hear my podcast episode about Dr. Seuss here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/soundlaws/Sound_Laws_and_Lessons_from_the_Life_of_Dr._Seuss.mp3
It wasn’t always apparent that Geisel would be a best-selling author. Geisel was born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. He started using the pen name “Dr. Seuss” to sign his cartoons while he was an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College and as a graduate student at Lincoln College at Oxford. This happened because he was prohibited for drawing cartoons for a humor magazine at the college because he was caught drinking gin with nine friends in his room. The possession and consumption of alcohol was illegal at the time under Prohibition laws which were in effect from 1920 through 1933. The dean of the university Dean Craven Laycock prohibited Geisel from participating in extracurricular activities including being a cartoonist for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern magazine. He was able to continue drawing cartoons for the magazine by signing his cartoons “Seuss” which was his middle name and his mother’s maiden name.
Geisel didn’t start writing children’s books until 1937 when he was thirty-three. According to biographer Brian Jay Jones:
“Geisel wrote and drew throughout the winter of 1936 and into early 1937, filling one trash can after another with discarded yellow pages and crumpled up drawings. ‘Six months later, I found I had a book on my hands,’ he said. ‘So, what to do with it?’ As a freelancer, Geisel had no literary agent to shop his book around New York on his behalf; if he wanted his book in the hands of publishers he was going to have to do it himself. So Ted hit the streets, lugging around his book—now called A Story That No One Can Beat—as he visited the offices of New York publishers. Other times, he mailed his original art to editors, waiting anxiously for weeks for a response, and—if the response was negative—hoping his art would be returned to him none the worse for wear.
“To his increasing distress, the responses were all negative. Geisel would later recall being rejected by twenty-seven publishers….No one was biting. While editors knew the Dr. Seuss name, it wasn’t enough to overcome some initial skepticism. Some editors expressed concern that A Story That No One Can Beat had no real moral lesson for children—that the narrator, as a result of choosing not to share his tall tale with his father, had suffered no consequences. (‘What’s wrong with kids having fun reading without being preached at?’ Ted groused.) Others argued that he should leave the rhyming verse to Mother Goose. Mostly, said Geisel, ‘[t]he main reason they all gave was there was nothing similar on the market, so of course it wouldn’t sell.’
“In the late spring of 1937, Geisel decided he was done with it. After one last rejection, he was walking up Madison Avenue toward his apartment on East 96th Street, with his book tucked under one arm, determined to ‘burn it in the incinerator’ when he got home. The walk back uptown would lead to one of the luckiest breaks of his career. ‘I’m a great believer in accidents,’ Geisel said later. ‘Everybody gets into things accidentally.’ As he reached the 400 block of Madison Avenue, he ran into Marshall ‘Mike’ McClintock—a fellow Dartmouth man. Class of 1926—who asked him what he was carrying.
“‘That’s a book no one will publish,’ Geisel told him. ‘I’m lugging it home to burn.’
McClintock told Geisel he’s just started a job as the juvenile book editor for Vanguard Press—housed in the very building they were standing in front of at 424 Madison Avenue—and asked Geisel if he’d like to come inside to show his book to Vanguard president James Henle. ‘So we went inside,’ reported Geisel, ‘…and he took me to the president of Vanguard Press.’
Henle turned Geisel over to editor Evelyn Shrifte, who agreed to formally acquire A Story That Can’t Be Beat. According to Geisel, the entire meeting from the first hello to the signing of contracts, had taken only twenty minutes.”
That chance encounter with Mike McClintock on Madison Avenue led to Geisel getting his first book published. It was retitled And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
It took a while to sell through the first 15,000 copies because the country was coming out of the Great Depression and the cost of $1 seemed to be a lot of money for Depression-era readers. By 1943, the book had only sold 31,600 copies. In 1938, Dr. Seuss published The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, which was one of my favorite books as a child. This book was dedicated to Chrysanthemum-Pearl (aged 89 months, going on 90).
Dr. Seuss and his wife Helen Geisel were unable to have children. Biographer Brian Jay Jones says: “While Dr. Seuss would be loved by millions—perhaps billions of kids and young readers around the world, Ted and Helen Geisel themselves would never have children. For the rest of his life, in one interview after another, Ted would find himself faced with the inevitable question ‘Why don’t yiou have any children of your own?’ His well-rehearsed response was a casual one: ‘You have ‘em, he’d say, ‘and I’ll entertain ‘em.’ But the publicly flip remark masked the Geisels’ own private sadness. ‘It was not that we didn’t want to have children,’ Ted explained later. ‘That wasn’t it.’
“Seven years earlier, around the time the Geisels had moved into their new apartment on East 96th Street, Helen had begun complaining of severe abdominal pains. Ted was concerned enough to take her to the hospital, where doctors determined she needed an immediate oophorectomy—a removal of both ovaries. While the actual diagnosis remains unclear, such a drastic medical remedy seems to indicate that doctors may have been concerned about severe ovarian cysts. Regardless, in 1931, only four years into their marriage—Ted was twenty-seven, Helen thirty-three—the Geisels knew they would never have children. Helen was devastated; she and Ted agreed to keep their grief private, restricting knowledge of Helen’s condition to their immediate family.”—Becoming Dr. Seuss, pp. 120-121.
Jones continues: “Unable to have any real children, then, Ted and Helen created a fictional one: Chrysanthemum-Pearl, born at about the time of Helen’s surgery (hence her age was given as eighty-nine months, or a little more than seven years, in 1938), and a precocious child whom the Geisels could good-naturedly discuss at dinner parties when the conversation turned to children. Friends were in on the ploy—though as far as they knew, Ted and Helen had simply chosen to remain childless and had made up Chrysanthemum-Pearl for some genial competitive fun.”—p. 121.
Throughout that heartbreak, Dr. Seuss continued to write. In 1938, Dr. Seuss met with Bennett Cerf of Random House publishing company who agreed to help him publish his idea for his next book if he would move his publishing over to Random House. Cerf agreed to publish the next book by Dr. Seuss entitled The Seven Lady Godivas. It was a failure and only sold 2,500 copies of the 10,000 that were printed. His next book, The King’s Stilts, sold 4,648 copies its first year.
Geisel had started cartooning when he was young, and created cartoons and advertisements for insecticides and motor oil for many years while he wrote numerous books. It wasn’t until he wrote his fifth book in three years that he started seeing success as an author. His fifth book was titled, Horton Hatches the Egg and it was published in 1940. Horton sold 5,800 copies its first year and 1,645 its second. He still wasn’t able to live off the sales he was making from his books. He became a political cartoonist, which led to him working in Hollywood, as he was involved in the production of political cartoon shorts that would appear before regular feature films were shown.
He was a part of writing and working on three Academy Award winning films. He learned much as he worked with Frank Capra on movies about the process of telling stories during World War II when he was involved in creating news reel and propaganda films for the government. In 1946, Dr. Seuss almost gave up on writing children’s books, but frustrating experiences in film (where he didn’t get credit for his work) caused him to get back into writing again.
In 1948, Dr. Seuss and his wife moved to La Jolla, California. He also got back into writing and published McElligot’s Pool and Thidwick the Big Hearted Moose in 1948 and 1949.
In July of 1949, an event happened that changed the course of his life. He was invited to teach and speak at a ten-day writer’s conference at The University of Utah. It was the first time, he thought about and taught what made a great children’s book.
Biographer Brian Jay Jones says: “Geisel took the assignment seriously, rereading old children’s books and stories, reflecting on his own struggles and experience as a writer and artist for children, and handwrote lengthy lecture notes and class exercises. It would turn out to be one of the most important assignments Geisel had ever taken on—a turning point in his career as a write and artist of children’s literature.”—p. 203.
Geisel was impressed by the son of a Salt Lake teacher named Libby Childs, whose three-year-old son Brad could quote Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose from memory. He realized the power of rhythmic prose for children who didn’t have a large vocabulary. After teaching this Utah writer’s workshop, Dr. Seuss was determined to write and draw books for children and young readers. His next few books If I Ran the Zoo and Scrambled Eggs Super weren’t very successful. He persisted and wrote Horton Hears a Who! in 1954 when he was fifty years old. His wife became seriously ill and he didn’t write publish another book until September 1955 entitled On Beyond Zebra.
Shortly before publishing that book, he received an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth. He originally planned to get a Ph.D. from Oxford, but he dropped out. He went by the pen name Dr. Seuss for years before he actually was given an honorary doctorate. He later told Dartmouth president John Dickey that with the degree he received, it ‘would make an honest man of me, and no longer would I have to masquerade under a phony doctorate’ (p. 252).
William Spaulding, who at the time was the head of the education division of Houghton Mifflin publishing, was looking for a new way to help children to read. As a result, he challenged Dr. Seuss to ‘write a story that first graders can’t put down.’ The Dick and Jane reading primers (which had been around since 1934) were under intense criticism for being a boring way to teach children to read. The challenge was that children’s primers were strictly limited to a certain number of words by grade. For first graders, the primers were limited to about 300 words. He went over the list again and again and finally decided to call his book The Cat in the Hat, since these two words were on the list and they rhymed. He ended up using 242 different words on the list and it was completely different than the Dick and Jane books. Dr. Suess said, “I think a youngster likes to read about someone who is bad for a change—then he realizes that he’s not the only one who gets into trouble, messes up the house when mother is away. The other thing that’s new in the Cat is humor. Kids repond to a little humor, to a crazy situation instead of that solemn old stuff, ‘See my dog. Spot. Run, Spot, run.’”
Parents were upset that their kids weren’t learning how to read and The Cat in the Hat was a fun book to read. The book flew off the shelves when it was published in early 1957 and was selling more than 1,000 copies a day and sold more than a million copies within the next three years.
In December of 1957, he published How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (which he had been working on along with The Cat in the Hat).
Biographer Brian Jay Jones says: “At age fifty-three, Geisel finally had his blockbuster. In 1957 alone, The Cat in the Hat, with a cover price of $1.95, earned more than $2 million in sales….The spectacular success of The Cat in the Hat would be the rising tide that floated all other previously published Dr. Seuss books….While Dr. Seuss has been something of a brand name before—after all, he had published thirteen books between 1937 and 1956—the two books published in 1957 would catapult Dr. Seuss from the status of merely beloved writer to that of national icon.”—p. 269-270.
Dr. Seuss changed the landscape for children’s books by treating his audience as serious readers. That approach allowed him to put Random House books on the map. He, Bennett Cerf’s wife Phyllis, and Helen then started the Beginner Books and Bright and Early Books imprints.
I was greatly inspired by reading Becoming Dr. Seuss and I would highly encourage you to read it. I have also read the other biographies by Brian Jay Jones on George Lucas and Jim Henson. He is a gifted researcher and writer. I thoroughly enjoy his writing style and he has a gift to make the life of his subjects come alive. I hope this brief look at the life of Dr. Seuss has helped you have the courage to persist even in the midst of failure and setbacks. Sometimes, it takes twenty years of consistency before the blockbuster happens.
