Dr. Seuss Exhibit
4th Floor Gallery, Main Library
On view through August 15, 2004. Exhibit is now closed.
Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as the beloved Dr. Seuss, was born in 1904 on Howard Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. Ted's father, Theodor Robert, and grandfather were brewmasters in the city. His mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, sang her children to sleep by "chanting" rhymes from her youth. Ted credited his mother with both his ability and desire to create the rhymes for which he became so well known.
The influence of Ted's memories of Springfield can be seen throughout his work. Drawings of Horton the Elephant meandering along streams in the Jungle of Nool, for example, mirror the watercourses in Springfield's Forest Park. The fanciful truck driven by Sylvester McMonkey McBean in The Sneetches could well be the Knox tractor that young Ted saw on the streets of Springfield. In addition to its name, Ted's first children's book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, is filled with Springfield images, including a look-alike of the mayor on the reviewing stand, and police officers riding red motorcycles.
Ted left Springfield as a teenager to attend Dartmouth College, where he became editor-in-chief of the Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth's humor magazine. Although his tenure as editor ended prematurely, he continued to contribute to the magazine, signing his work "Seuss." This is the first record of the "Seuss" pseudonym, which was both Ted's middle name and his mother's maiden name.
After graduation from Dartmouth, Ted went on to Oxford University in England to be a college professor where he met classmate, Helen Palmer, who became his first wife and also a children's author and book editor.
After returning to the United States, Ted began his career as a cartoonist. The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines published some of his early pieces, but most of Ted's early career was devoted to creating advertising campaigns for Standard Oil, which he did for more than 15 years.
During World War II, Ted began contributing weekly political cartoons to PM magazine and also served with Frank Capra's Signal Corps (U.S. Army) making training movies. It was here that he was introduced to the art of animation and developed a series of animated training films featuring a trainee called Private Snafu.
While Ted was continuing to contribute to Life, Vanity Fair, and other magazines, Viking Press offered him a contract to illustrate a collection of children's sayings called Boners. Although the book was not a commercial success, the illustrations received great reviews, providing Ted with his first "big break" into children's literature. Getting the first book that he both wrote and illustrated, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, published, however, required a great degree of persistence - it was rejected 27 times before being published by Vanguard Press.
The Cat in the Hat, perhaps the defining book of Ted's career, developed as part of a unique joint venture between Houghton Mifflin (Vanguard Press) and Random House. Houghton Mifflin asked Ted to write and illustrate a children's primer using only 225 "new-reader" vocabulary words. Because he was under contract to Random House, Random House obtained the trade publication rights, and Houghton Mifflin kept the school rights. With the release of The Cat in the Hat, Ted became the definitive children's book author and illustrator.
After Ted's first wife died in 1967, Ted married an old friend, Audrey Stone Geisel, who influenced his later books keeps his legacy as the president of Dr. Seuss Enterprises. At the time of his death on September 24, 1991, Ted had written and illustrated 44 children's books, including such all-time favorites as Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You'll Go, Fox in Socks, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His books had been translated into more than 15 languages. Over 200 million copies had found their way into homes and hearts around the world. Besides the books, his works have provided the source for eleven children's television specials, the Broadway musical, Seussical, and two feature length motion pictures featuring Jim Carrey as the Grinch and Mike Myers as The Cat in the Hat.
His honors include two Academy awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award and the Pulitzer Prize.
http://www.npl.org/Pages/KidsPlace/Calendar/drseuss.html
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