Who Was Dr. Seuss?

by Janet Pascal

  Ted and Helen finally had exactly the life they wanted. They had plenty of money, so Ted didn’t have to do any more ads. Helen was happy to take care of all the practical details of life so he could just write and draw all day. They did not have family of their own, but they became close with Ted’s niece, Peggy.

  Ted had loved playing with Peggy when she was a baby. Even after he and Marnie were not speaking, he kept in touch with Peggy. In her twenties, Peggy moved out to California. She lived in the Geisel’s tower for a while. She even got married there. Her son, another Ted, named Teddy, was like a grandson to the Geisels. He was quiet and gentle like Ted, and he wanted to be an artist. Teddy was one of the few people Ted would allow into the studio while he was working.

  Over the next ten years, Ted wrote twelve books, including classics like The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, and Hop on Pop!

  All of Ted’s stories were a lot of fun, but they also brought up serious ideas. Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories is about a tyrant who pushes everyone around and an ordinary little turtle who is brave enough to stand up to him. Ted based Yertle on Hitler, and he worried that people might object to this. But actually, the only problem came when the little turtle burps. “Nobody had ever burped before on the pages of a children’s book,” Ted explained.

  Another book that meant a lot to him was The Sneetches and Other Stories. During the early 1960s, black people were struggling to win their civil rights. In his book, Ted described all the trouble between the star-bellied Sneetches and the Sneetches without stars. The story shows how silly Ted thought it was for people to hate one another because they looked different.

  It was hard work writing all those books. Ted spent eight hours a day at his desk, seven days a week. He said that he did his best work when he wrote himself into a corner—“so there was seemingly no way of ending the book”—and then had to write his way out.

  Helen had to deal with Ted’s moods while he was doing this. She explained, “About two weeks before the completion of every book he . . . decides that nothing in the book is any good . . .” Then she had to talk him out of throwing the whole thing away.

  After he finished a book, he was just as bad. He would worry, “I’m never going to write anything, I’ve lost it, I just can’t do it.” Then one of his doodles would start his mind moving, and he’d be happy again.

  Work was always the center of Ted’s life. But sometimes he did take a break. He and Helen enjoyed traveling all over the world. They looked at elephant seals in Mexico. In Peru, they helped search for mummies. They went to Australia, Africa, and Hawaii.

  HOW DO YOU SAY GRINCH IN CHINESE?

  AT FIRST, DR. SEUSS’S BOOKS WERE NOT WELL-KNOWN OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES. PEOPLE IN ENGLAND THOUGHT THEY WERE TOO “AMERICAN”—VULGAR, RUDE, AND SLANGY. AND IT WAS HARD TO INTRODUCE THE BOOKS TO OTHER COUNTRIES BECAUSE DR. SEUSS’S RHYMES AND INVENTED WORDS WERE ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO TRANSLATE. CLEVER TRANSLATORS TRIED, HOWEVER, AND SOON DR. SEUSS’S FAME SPREAD AROUND THE WHOLE WORLD. EVENTUALLY HIS BOOKS APPEARED IN MORE THAN TWENTY LANGUAGES, INCLUDING CHINESE, SWEDISH, SPANISH, HEBREW, MAORI, LATIN, JAPANESE, GREEK, AND YIDDISH.

  At home, they loved to entertain. Guests would gather around the piano and sing. Sometimes the Geisels set up special treats, like a helicopter ride around the California coast. And Ted and his friends still loved to play practical jokes on one another.

  The business of being famous took up more and more of Ted’s time. In 1957 alone, he received almost a thousand pounds of fan mail. Helen answered most of it. She signed her letters “Mrs. Dr. Seuss.”

  Ted was still terrified of speaking in public, but now that he was so famous, sometimes he had to. He found that he could do it as long as the speech was in verse. He once explained to a big group of booksellers: “As everyone present undoubtedly knows . . . I am completely incapable of speaking in prose.”

  Chapter 10

  I Speak for the Trees

  After many happy years together, Helen began struggling with illness and depression again. On October 23, 1967, she died. She was sixty-eight years old. For forty years, she had taken care of everything for Ted. She handled money matters, shielded him from publicity, and went over every line he wrote. He did not know how to live life alone. He needed a companion. In 1968, he married Audrey Dimond, a close friend of the Geisels for many years.

  Ted enjoyed pointing out that when he first met Audrey, not only had she never read any of his books, she had never heard of Dr. Seuss. When he was introduced—as “our very own dear Dr. Seuss”—she assumed he was a medical doctor.

  Audrey quickly became interested in his work, however, and soon she was discussing every detail with him, just as Helen had done.

  Shortly after Ted and Audrey were married, Ted’s father died at the age of eighty-nine. For years Ted had worried that he was a disappointment to his father. Sometimes they did not speak to each other for a long time. But as Ted became more successful and happy with his life, they had become good friends. Ted always treasured the enormous stone dinosaur footprint his father had given him. He carried it with him from house to house all his life.

  By 1970, the view of La Jolla from Ted’s tower window had changed. Once he had looked out on beaches and trees, but now the land was covered with houses and apartments. He decided he had to write a book about caring for the natural world. For the first time, the message for his book came to him before the story or characters.

  Writing The Lorax, Ted said, was “the hardest thing I have ever done.” He had read so many facts, and he cared so much about the natural world, that the story kept turning into a lecture. When he was completely stuck, Audrey said to him, “Let’s go to Africa.”

  In Kenya, Ted was excited to discover trees that looked just like the puffy ones he had invented for his new book. “They’ve stolen my truffula trees!” he exclaimed. On a safari trip, he saw a herd of wild elephants ambling by. Suddenly he knew exactly what he wanted to say. He grabbed some scrap paper and wrote almost the whole story in one sitting.

  The Lorax tells the story of a beautiful land where truffula trees grow. The Once-ler wants to chop them all down to use in his factories. It is the Lorax who “speaks for the trees.” It was Ted’s favorite of all his books, but it didn’t sell very well at first. People thought it preached too much. A few years later, when saving the environment was on everyone’s mind, the book found its audience.

  In 1989, The Lorax became the first Dr. Seuss book to encounter censorship. The logging industry wanted it off school reading lists. But Ted argued that he wasn’t against logging or industry. “I live in a house made of wood and write books printed on paper,” he pointed out. He was just against the greed that made people go too far and ignore the damage they caused.

  In 1984, The Butter Battle Book came out. It, too, made some people angry. It tells the story of the Yooks and the Zooks, enemies who keep building bigger and more complicated weapons to fight against each other. Finally they each have a weapon that could destroy everyone. They stand facing each other, wondering what will happen next. Ted didn’t feel he could write a comforting happy ending. After all, in the real world, the United States and the USSR were both trying to build bigger, better weapons. So in The Butter Battle Book, Ted left it up to his readers to think about how the story should end.

  Some people wanted this book taken off of library shelves. Ted had worked hard to convince the United States to fight in World War II. How could he write a book against war? Audrey comforted him by telling him, “You’re not just writing books for children, you’re writing for humanity.” The book’s success proved her point. It was the first children’s book ever to spend six months on the adult best seller list of the New York Times Book Review.

  Ted liked to joke that he was responsible for the end of the Cold War. In 1990, a version of The Butter Battle Book was televised in the Soviet Union. “Right after that,” Ted pointed out, “the USSR began falling apart
.”

  Chapter 11

  Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

  The same year he wrote The Butter Battle Book, Ted received a great honor—a Pulitzer Prize. This prize for American writing had never been given to a children’s book writer. He was so surprised that he had a hard time convincing himself it wasn’t a hoax.

  In 1990, he published Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, summing up his view of life. The illustrations sum up his work, too. If you look carefully, there are details from his earlier books everywhere. Dr. Seuss speaks to his readers directly throughout the whole story, describing all the challenges and adventures facing a young person starting out on the road of life. He ends cheerfully, but he doesn’t make any promises: “And will you succeed? Yes, you will indeed! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)”

  Ted realized this book would probably be his last. He was almost eighty-six years old. For most of his life, he had been a heavy smoker. He was never able to break the habit, even after his dentist found cancer in his mouth. Less than two years later, on September 24, 1991, Ted Geisel died at the age of eighty-seven. One of the last things he told his wife was, “I’ve had a wonderful life. I’ve done what I had to do. I lived where I wished to live. I had love. I had everything.”

  As Ted had wanted, he had no funeral and no grave. But people everywhere mourned him and remembered him with love. At Dartmouth, the students and teachers sat outside for twenty-four hours reading his books aloud.

  Even after Ted Geisel’s death, Dr. Seuss lived on. During the course of his career, he wrote some forty books. In 2001, when Publishers Weekly drew up a list of the top 150 best-selling children’s books of all time, twenty-four were by Dr. Seuss.

  Ted’s longtime agent estimated that something by Dr. Seuss is the first book given to one out of every four children born in the United States. And Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is one of the most popular gifts for high school and college graduates. So today, over a century after Theodor Geisel was born, most American childhoods begin and end with Dr. Seuss.

  TIMELINE OF THEODOR SEUSS GEISEL’S LIFE

  TIMELINE OF THE WORLD

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1 Cohen, Charles D. The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Random House Books for Young Readers, New York, 2004.

  Morgan, Judith, and Neil Morgan. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel: A Biography. Random House, New York, 1995.

  Nel, Philip. Dr. Seuss: American Icon. The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., New York, 2004.

  Pease, Donald E. Theodor Seuss Geisel. Oxford University Press, New York, 2010.

  1 Seuss, Dr. Your Favorite Seuss: A Bakers’s Dozen by the One and Only Dr. Seuss. Compiled by Janet Schulman and Cathy Goldsmith. Random House Books for Young Readers, New York, 2004.

  1 Starred books are for young readers.