Dr. Seuss

Prohibition closed the family brewery in Springfield, and the mayor handed his father the city parks to run instead. Ted Geisel and his sister Marnie were German-descended children in an American town after 1914, and the other children made sure they knew it. At Dartmouth he edited the humour magazine until a dean caught him drinking gin in his room with nine friends and stripped him of every activity he had. He went on drawing for the magazine anyway, signing the work with his middle name, which was his mother's maiden name: Seuss. He went to Lincoln College, Oxford, meaning to take a doctorate in English literature, and a fellow student named Helen Palmer told him he was wasting himself and should draw. He married her on November 29, 1927.

Advertising paid for the first stretch. His Flit insecticide campaign began on May 31, 1928, and the line Quick, Henry, the Flit turned into a national catchphrase with a song attached. His first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was turned down by between 20 and 43 publishers — the accounts vary, and one of them is his. He told it as a chance meeting on the street with a Dartmouth classmate who had just taken a job editing children's books. The war took him next: a captain in the Army's First Motion Picture Unit, writing Private Snafu cartoons and training films under Frank Capra, and an Academy Award in 1947 for the documentary Design for Death. Then in 1957 came the book that changed the trade, out of a word list.

He drew more than 400 cartoons for the newspaper PM during the war, going after Hitler, Mussolini and American isolationists with real ferocity, and he went after Japanese Americans too. If we want to win, he wrote, we have got to kill Japs. He supported the internment. Afterward he reconsidered, wrote Horton Hears a Who in 1954 as an allegory of the American occupation of Japan, and dedicated it to a Japanese friend. The other reckoning was private. His wife Helen had struggled with illness for years. She died by suicide on October 23, 1967. Nine months later, on August 5, 1968, Geisel married Audrey Dimond, a married mother of two with whom he had been having an affair while Helen was alive.

He died of cancer at his La Jolla house on September 24, 1991, at 87, having never had a child of his own. Audrey Geisel ran the estate until her death on December 19, 2018, and the licensing has sat with Dr. Seuss Enterprises since. On March 2, 2021, which would have been his 117th birthday, the company announced it would stop publishing six of the books, the first one among them, on the grounds that they portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong. It was a political argument within a day. The other 60-odd titles kept selling, out of a lifetime total past 600 million copies in more than 20 languages.

Dr. Seuss's life against the full span of the corpus.

• And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street book
  Rejected by between 20 and 43 publishers. Withdrawn from print in 2021. 1937
• Design for Death film
  Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature 1947
• Horton Hears a Who! book
  An allegory of the American occupation of Japan, dedicated to a Japanese friend 1954
• The Cat in the Hat book
  Built from 236 words off a 348-word first-grade list 1957
• Green Eggs and Ham book
  Fifty words, and among the best-selling children's books ever printed 1960
• The Lorax book
  The one he said he was proudest of arguing with 1971

• 1925 aged ~21 Graduates from Dartmouth, already signing his work Seuss
• November 29, 1927 aged 23 Marries Helen Palmer, who told him to draw instead of teach
• May 31, 1928 aged 24 His first Flit advertisement runs Quick, Henry, the Flit became a national catchphrase.
• 1937 aged ~33 Vanguard Press publishes And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street
• 1943 aged ~39 Commissioned a captain in the First Motion Picture Unit He wrote Private Snafu cartoons and training films under Frank Capra.
• 1957 aged ~53 The Cat in the Hat is published Written to a word list supplied by William Ellsworth Spaulding at Houghton Mifflin.
• October 23, 1967 aged 63 Helen Palmer Geisel dies by suicide
• August 5, 1968 aged 64 Marries Audrey Dimond
• March 2, 2021 aged 117 Dr. Seuss Enterprises withdraws six books from publication It said they portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.

• Walt Disney 1901–1966
  Animator and business magnate who created Mickey Mouse and built the world's largest entertainment empire. rival maker of American childhood
• Jim Henson 1936–1990
  Creator of the Muppets and a central figure in Sesame Street and family television. successor in children's media
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. campaigned for him in the PM cartoons
• Norman Rockwell 1894–1978
  Illustrator whose idealized depictions of American life graced magazine covers for nearly 50 years. fellow illustrator of the American self-image
• Rachel Carson 1907–1964
  Marine biologist whose book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. his conservation argument, a decade earlier