Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Children’s Author and Cartoonist Dr. Seuss: Not That Kind of Doctor, But a Medical School Bears His Name

2024; Elsevier BV; Volume: 99; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.mayocp.2024.01.007

1942-5546

David P. Steensma,

Themes in Literature Analysis

View Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT) Theodor "Ted" Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on March 2, 1904. His paternal grandfather, Theodor, was a jeweler who emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1867 and bought a brewery. His father managed the brewery until Prohibition banned alcohol sales in 1920, then became a park supervisor for the city of Springfield. One of the city's parks included a zoo, and young Ted, who showed skill at drawing early in life, frequently sketched the animals. His mother Henrietta's maiden name was Seuss, which the family pronounced "soyce" in the German fashion. Her parents were also German immigrants, and they ran a bakery in Springfield. Ted later changed the pronunciation of his middle name to "soose," because it evoked Mother Goose and many Americans pronounced the name that way anyway. Ted Geisel had an older sister, Marnie (Margaretha, 1902-1945) and a younger sister Henrietta who died at age 15 months in 1907. Ted and his sister grew up speaking both English and German, and the family experienced some of the widespread anti-German sentiment during World War I. After graduating from Central High School in Springfield, Ted attended Dartmouth College, where he edited a humor magazine, The Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, which still exists today. During his undergraduate years, he was caught drinking alcohol on the college campus and banned from all extracurricular activities as punishment. Subsequently, he began publishing under his middle name "Seuss" so that the Dartmouth Dean wouldn't know he was still writing for college publications. Geisel used this Seuss pen name for the rest of his life, appending "Dr." in the late 1920s because his father had wanted him to study medicine. Allegedly he planned to use his real name if he ever wrote a great novel. Other pen names included Theo LeSieg (ie, Geisel spelled backwards), Dr. Theophrastus Seuss, and Rosetta Stone. After graduation in 1925, Geisel went on to Lincoln College (University of Oxford), where he met his wife, Helen Palmer (1898-1967), a Wellesley College graduate originally from New York City. Returning to the United States in 1927 without finishing a DPhil degree, Seuss became a full-time illustrator and cartoonist at the encouragement of his wife. His first published cartoon appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1927. In the following years, he created many advertisements and became wealthy, and he and his wife traveled widely. He published his first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in 1937. Mulberry Street is in Springfield, near his childhood home. This was followed by The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins in 1938, and 2 other children's books before the onset of World War II. During World War II, Geisel wrote political cartoons supportive of the war effort, created posters for the Treasury Department promoting war bonds, and worked for the United States Army illustrating training and propaganda films. He supported Japanese interment during the war and drew several derogatory caricatures. He later changed his views and dedicated his book Horton Hears a Who! (1954) – an allegory of American post-war occupation of Japan – to a Japanese friend. After the war, Geisel and his wife moved to La Jolla, California, where he lived in a home with an observatory tower on top of Mount Soledad for the next 4 decades. During the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Seuss published many of his most famous books, including If I Ran the Circus (1956), The Cat in the Hat (1957, a book specifically designed to improve literacy in young children), How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957, adapted for television by Chuck Jones in the 1960s), and Green Eggs and Ham (1960). His illustration style included dynamic watercolor figures with few straight lines. The accompanying text was usually witty verse in anapestic tetrameter, promoting universal values without sermonizing or moralizing. The Lorax was published in 1971, and was one of several books made into feature films after Geisel's death. The Butter Battle Book in 1984 was a commentary on nuclear weapon proliferation. His final book, Oh, The Places You'll Go (1990), became a school graduation gift staple in the United States. In 1955, Geisel received an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College, and joked he would then need to call himself "Doctor Dr. Seuss." His wife Helen took her own life in 1967 after a long illness. The following year he married Audrey Dimond (1921-2018), with whom he remained until his death from cancer in September 1991. Geisel received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from children's librarians and a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his lifetime of achievement, but surprisingly, he never won the annual Caldecott or Newberry Awards for children's literature. Several of his books are among the best-selling children's books of all time and continue to sell briskly. In 2020, Forbes ranked Dr. Seuss number 2 on a list of highest paid dead celebrities, after Michael Jackson. Most of his books are still in print, but in 2021 Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that 6 of them, including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, would no longer published because of racist imagery. Cumulatively, more than 200 million copies of his books have been sold to date. In 2002, the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden opened in Springfield, including many sculptures of characters from his books. There is a Geisel Library at the University of California at San Diego, a Geisel crater on planet Mercury, and a Dr. Seuss star on Hollywood Boulevard. In 2012, the Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire— established in 1797— was renamed Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in honor of the many years of support by Ted Geisel and his widow Audrey. Presumably his father would have been pleased. Geisel was honored philatelically by the United States in 2004 (Scott 3835). On this stamp he is accompanied by the characters from The Cat In The Hat, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Oh Say Can You Say?, and I Had Trouble in Getting To Solla Sollew. The Cat in The Hat character received his own stamp in 1998 as part of a sheet celebrating the 1950s in America (Scott 3187h), as did the Fox in Socks, in a series honoring children's book animals in 2006 (Scott 3989). The United Nations (Scott 1067) included images from Seuss' book One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish — which was the author of this vignette's favorite book as a small child — to commemorate World Oceans Day on June 8, 2013. Three different sheets were issued in 3 languages by the United Nations' offices in New York, Geneva, and Vienna. The authors report no competing interests.