Who On Earth Was Dr.Seuss? A Cartoonist Became the King of Children’s Books? Theodor Seuss Geisel was never supposed to be a household name. If you had encountered him in the early 1920s, a Dartmouth graduate who liked to doodle and had an idiosyncratic sense of humor, you could be forgiven for assuming he was a magazine illustrator. Or, if you knew him as a man-child, or even as an adman, you’d probably think of him as your coked-up copywriter with a weakness for nonsense rhymes. And here, somehow, was this man — who never had children, who hated being around them in large groups and who once said that he wrote books for “people” rather than “kids” — the lone voice of children in America. The journey of how that happened is not linear. It’s not the story of a boy with a dream, who studied children’s literature and worked his way up the publishing ladder. It’s more like a series of odd bounces—a fluke, a rejection, a dare—that collectively reshaped an industry. To understand Dr. Seuss is to understand how, in the American tradition, genius often hides behind whimsy. Grab a copy of this book now!
