DR SEUSS LIFE

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DR SEUSS LIFE

Dr. Seuss is a world recognized writer, his complete name is Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known by the world as the beloved Dr. Seuss; he was born in 1904 on Howard Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father Theodor Robert, and grandfather were brew masters in the city. His mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, often soothed her children to sleep by "chanting" rhymes remembered 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 Geisels had a good financial success; despite of this the situation of World War I and the Prohibition presented both financial and social challenges for the German immigrants. Nonetheless, the family persevered and again prospered, providing Ted and his sister, Marnie happy childhoods.

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 from the period. 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 imagery, including a look-alike of Mayor Fordis Parker on the reviewing stand, and police officers riding red motorcycles: the traditional color of Springfield's famed Indian Motocycles.

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 when Ted and his friends were caught throwing a drinking party, which was against the prohibition laws and school policy, he continued to contribute to the magazine, signing his work "Seuss." This is the first record of The Cat in the Hatthe "Seuss" pseudonym, which was both Ted's middle name and his mother's maiden name.

To please his father, who wanted him to be a college professor, Ted went on to Oxford University in England after graduation. However, his academic studies bored him, and he decided to tour Europe instead. Oxford did provide him the opportunity to meet a classmate, Helen Palmer, who not only became his first wife, but also a children's author and book editor.

After returning to the United States, Ted began to pursue a career as a cartoonist. The Saturday Evening Post and other publications published some of his early pieces, but the bulk of Ted's activity during his early career was devoted to creating advertising campaigns for Standard Oil, which he did for more than 15 years.

As World War II approached, Ted's focus shifted, and he began contributing weekly political cartoons to PM magazine, a liberal publication. Too old for the draft, but wanting to contribute to the war effort, Ted 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, Judge 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 not only influenced his later books, but now guards 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, a Broadway musical and a feature-length motion picture. Other major motion pictures are on the way.

His honors included two Academy awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award and the Pulitzer Prize.

10 STORIES BEHIND DR SEUSS STORIES

1. In case you haven't read "The Lorax," it's widely recognized as Dr. Seuss' take on environmentalism and how humans are destroying nature. Loggers were so upset about the book that some groups within the industry sponsored "The Truax," a similar book -- but from the logging point of view.Another interesting fact: the book used to contain the line, "I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie," but 14 years after the book was published, the Ohio Sea Grant Program wrote to Seuss creator Theodore Geisel, and told him how much the conditions had improved and implored him to take the line out. Geisel agreed and said that it wouldn't be in future editions.2. Somehow, Geisel's books find themselves in the middle of controversy. The line "A person's a person, no matter how small," from "Horton Hears a Who!," has been used as a slogan for anti-abortion organizations. It's often questioned whether that was Seuss' intent in the first place, but when he was still alive, he threatened to sue an anti-abortion group unless they removed his words from their letterhead.Karl ZoBell, the attorney for Dr. Seuss' interests and for his widow, Audrey Geisel, says that she doesn't like people to "hijack Dr. Seuss characters or material to front their own points of view." 3. "If I Ran the Zoo," published in 1950, is the first recorded instance of the word "nerd."4. "The Cat in the Hat" was written because Dr. Seuss thought the famous Dick and Jane primers were insanely boring. Because kids weren't interested in the material, they weren't exactly compelled to use it repeatedly in their efforts to learn to read. So, "The Cat in the Hat" was born.5. Bennett Cerf, Dr. Seuss' editor, bet him that he couldn't write a book using 50 words or less. "The Cat in the Hat" was pretty simple, after all, and it used 225 words. Not one to back down from a challenge, Mr. Geisel started writing and came up with "Green Eggs and Ham" -- which uses exactly 50 words.The 50 words are: by the way, are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you. 6. It's often alleged that "Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!" was written specifically about Richard Nixon, but the book came out only two months after the whole Watergate scandal. It's unlikely that the book could have been conceived of, written, edited and mass-produced in such a short time.Also, Seuss never admitted that the story was originally about Nixon. That's not to say he didn't understand how well the two flowed together. In 1974, he sent a copy of Marvin K. Mooney to his friend Art Buchwald at the Washington Post. In it, he crossed out "Marvin K. Mooney" and replaced it with "Richard M. Nixon," which Buchwald reprinted in its entirety.7. "Yertle the Turtle" = Hitler? Yep. If you haven't read the story, here's a little overview: Yertle is the king of the pond, but he wants more. He demands that other turtles stack themselves up so he can sit on top of them to survey the land. Mack, the turtle at the bottom, is exhausted. He asks Yertle for a rest; Yertle ignores him and demands more turtles for a better view.Eventually, Yertle notices the moon and is furious that anything dare be higher than himself, and is about ready to call for more turtles when Mack burps. This sudden movement topples the whole stack, sends Yertle flying into the mud, and frees the rest of the turtles from their stacking duty.Dr. Seuss actually said Yertle was a representation of Hitler. Despite the political nature of the book, none of that was disputed at Random House -- what was disputed was Mack's burp. No one had ever let a burp loose in a children's book before, so it was a little dicey. In the end, obviously, Mack burped. Mental Floss: The Dr. Seuss quiz8. "The Butter Battle Book" is one I had never heard of, perhaps with good reason: it was pulled from the shelves of libraries for a while because of the reference to the Cold War and the arms race.Yooks and Zooks are societies who do everything differently. The Yooks eat their bread with the butter-side up and the Zooks eat their bread with the butter-side down. Obviously, one of them must be wrong, so they start building weapons to outdo each other: the "Tough-Tufted Prickly Snick-Berry Switch," the "Triple-Sling Jigger," the "Jigger-Rock Snatchem," the "Kick-A-Poo Kid", the "Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitz," the "Utterly Sputter" and the "Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo."The book concludes with each side ready to drop their ultimate bombs on each other, but the reader doesn't know how it actually turns out.9. "Oh The Places You'll Go" is the final Seuss book published before he passed away. Published in 1990, it sells about 300,000 copies every year because so many people give it to college and high school grads.10. No Dr. Seuss post would be complete without a mention of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" Frankenstein's Monster himself, Boris Karloff, provided the voice of the Grinch and the narration for the movie. Seuss was a little wary of casting him because he thought his voice would be too scary for kids. If you're wondering why they sound a bit different, it's because the sound people went back to the Grinch's parts and removed all of the high tones in Karloff's voice. That's why the Grinch sounds so gravelly.Tony the Tiger, AKA Thurl Ravenscroft, is the voice behind "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch." He received no credit on screen, so Dr. Seuss wrote to columnists in every major U.S. newspaper to tell them exactly who had sung the song.

'Lost' Dr Seuss stories to be published

The four obscure stories include early incarnations of favourites The Grinch and Horton, which will come out in a picture book for the first time.They were originally printed in a 1950s US magazine, which was often discarded when the next monthly issue came out.US writer Seuss wrote a series of well-loved books including The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham.Theodor Seuss Geisel - created a string of imaginative characters and wrote tales in an infectious rhyming style.He died in 1991 at the age of 87 after publishing 43 titles during his career.The new compilation of four stories, called Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories, shows the helpful, friendly elephant of the title duped into carrying an insect for the promise of a tasty beezlenut tree - which turns out to be out of reach.The Grinch, universally known for stealing Christmas, is equally devious in his 1955 appearance, convincing a creature called the hoobub to buy a piece of green string that he says is more valuable than the sun.

Seuss publishers Random House Books for Young Readers, said the revived stories would have "a colour palette enhanced beyond that of the magazines in which the stories originally appeared".The book will enable fans to "learn more about Horton's integrity and a devious Grinch," they added.

Jim Carrey brought The Grinch to life on the big screenIt follows a collection of similarly "lost" Dr Seuss stories which was published in 2011.Seuss expert Charles D Cohen, who writes an introduction to the new book, called The New stories"fresh encounters with old friends and familiar places", added that their original publication in Redbook Magazine in the 1950s had led them to be "largely forgotten".Dr Seuss's work has been successfully transferred to the big screen, with his friendly elephant appearing in Horton Hears a Who! and the grumpy Grinch being brought to life by Hollywood star Jim Carrey.

9 Facts to Know About the Famed Author

While many of us know him through the lens of his beloved characters, there was much more to Geisel than his drawings and rhymes. Below, there are a few things you may not have known about good ol Dr. Seuss:

Geisel started using the pen name Dr. Seuss after he was forced to resign from his post as editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth humor magazine, Jack-O-Lantern. He was caught throwing a party and drinking gin with his friends in his room, and because this was back during Prohibition, he had to pay the price. He managed to keep writing for the magazine, but under the pseudonym Seuss, which was his mothers maiden name. He started using Dr. Seuss after he graduated college, as a consolation to his father for never pursuing medicine. The Cat in the Hat author originally said the correct pronunciation of Seuss rhymes with voice. He later changed it to rhyme with goose, as it was how most people pronounced it. Geisel also wrote under the pen names Theo LeSieg and Rosetta Stone. He is said to have coined the word nerd. According to TheFW.com, the first recorded instance of the word nerd is in Seuss 1950 book, If I Ran the Zoo. Before he started writing childrens books, Geisel was an ad man, creating satirical advertisements for General Electric, Standard Oil, NBC, and others. He was also a World War II political cartoonist, and joined the Army as a Captain, making educational and propaganda films. Two documentary films based on works he created (Hitler Lives? and Design for Death) won Academy Awards. Dr. Seuss practiced what he preached: his first book, And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected by 27 different publishers before it finally got picked up. Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try! Seuss once wrote. Try, try, try again, he did. Though he knows how to write for children and their wild imaginations, he never had kids of his own. You make em, I amuse em, he once said. His wife said in an interview once that he couldnt just sit down on the floor and play with them, and was always a bit uncomfortable and afraid around them. He had a bit of a dirty mouth, and would try to sneak in some PG-13 language into his works. The first version of Hop on Pop that was sent to his publisher included the word contraceptive in one of the verses.Geisel considered his greatest achievement to be killing off the Dick and Jane books, which he said werent challenging enough for children, and were boring. Dr. Seuss books became the new standard in childrens publishingexpanding the imagination through brilliant illustration, social issues, and clever rhymes and vocabulary.

THE CAT IN THE HAT

The Cat in the Hat, the book about a mischievous, irrepressible soul who always seemed kind of ageless, is 50 years old. At the time of its debut in 1957, the Cat was an instant success. The Dr. Seuss classic is still captivating to children and the adults who read to them.

It has everything a classic needs a great plot, great characters, wonderful illustrations and a unique voice, says Anita Silvey, author of 100 Best Books for Children.

"Some books we read and we forget them right away," she says. "But there are those other books, that they just stay with us. And The Cat in the Hat is that kind of book."

And that means if you grew up reading The Cat in the Hat, there's a pretty good chance your children will read it, too.

On a cold, snowy, winter afternoon, Sonya Cohen curled up on a living room couch to listen to her children, 9-year-old Dio and 6-year-old Gabel read from one of her favorite childhood books.

Cohen began reading the book to her children while they were much younger. Dio, now a proficient reader, says she can remember sounding out the words to The Cat in the Hat when she was first learning to read .

"I liked the rhythm and the choice of words because they were not too easy and not too hard," she says.

In fact, the words to The Cat in the Hat were drawn from a vocabulary list for 6- and 7-year-olds. The list was given to Theodor Geisel, best known as Dr. Seuss, by William Spaulding, then the director of Houghton Mifflin's educational division.

According to Philip Nel, author of The Annotated Cat, Spaulding had seen a 1954 Life magazine article by the writer John Hersey. In that article, Hersey took on a problem that was bothering Americans at the time: Why Johnny can't read. Hersey concluded that the "Dick and Jane" readers that most schools used were just too boring. Hersey suggested that Dr. Seuss write a new reading primer for the nation's schoolchildren.

Nel says that Spaulding liked that idea and issued a challenge to Dr. Seuss.

"He said, 'Write me a story that first-graders can't put down.' And so Seuss did and he wrote The Cat in the Hat to replace Dick and Jane. And it was a huge hit. It was a huge commercial success from the moment of its publication. It really is the book that made Dr. Seuss, Dr. Seuss," Nel says.

Dr. Seuss had been a fairly successful children's book author up until then, though he was not yet a household name. He thought it would be easy to write the book Spaulding wanted, and expected to dash it off in no time. It took him a year and a half. Seuss underestimated how hard it would be to write a book using just over 200 words, Nel says.

"Seuss was used to inventing words when he needed them, so to stick to a word list was a huge challenge for him," Nel says. "And, in fact, his favorite story about the creation of The Cat in the Hat is that it was born out of his frustration with the word list. He said he would come up with an idea, but then he would have no way to express that idea. So he said...: 'I read the list three times and almost went out of my head. I said I'll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that will be my book. I found cat and hat and I said the title will be The Cat in the Hat.'"

In the end, Nel says, Seuss used exactly 236 words to write The Cat in the Hat, words that young readers can understand.

But if the words are important, so too are the characters and situations that Seuss created: An outrageous cat and two strange things creating havoc on a rainy day. And perhaps the most controversial character: the scolding goldfish who warns of dire consequences.

The secret to Dr. Seuss' success may be his ability to zero in on what kids like and, Nel says, his ability to create a character like the cat who embodies that.

"He breaks the rules and gets away with it. He's a lot of fun. He creates chaos and creates excitement, and relieves the boredom of a rainy day. And in the end, everything's cleaned up, mother comes home and is none the wiser."

DR SEUSS

Trs apprci et considr comme une icne en son temps aux USA principalement, il publia plus de 60 livres pour enfants, souvent caractriss par leurs personnages originaux, leurs rimes et l'utilisation frquente des mtres trisyllabiques.Parmi ses livres les plus renomms, on retrouve des classiques tels que Le Chat chapeaut (The Cat in the Hat), Le Grincheux qui voulait gcher Nol (How the grinch stole Christmas) ou encore Horton hears a Who!. Il a particip l'criture des scnarios des dessins anims de Private Snafu.Ses uvres donnrent lieu onze adaptations la tlvision, cinq au cinma et une sous forme de comdie musicale Broadway.Seuss travailla comme illustrateur pour des campagnes publicitaires, et comme dessinateur de presse pour PM, un magazine new yorkais. Durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il intgra l'arme pour travailler dans le dpartement de l'animation de l'US Air Force; il y crivit le scnario de Design for Death, un film qui gagna en 1948 l'Oscar du meilleur film documentaire.