Today marks the 108th birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel more famously known as Dr. Seuss.
A wonderful children’s author, Dr. Seuss may have written in a type of English that didn’t always make perfect sense, but his universal appeal is unmistakeable. His 46 children’s books have been loved by pretty much any child and adult who picked one up. Today the good doctor would have turned 108. He passed away in 1991 after a battle with throat cancer and years of poor health.
His books are packed with imaginative characters and playful rhymes, some of his most celebrated titles include best-sellers like Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton Hears a Who!, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
Dr. Seuss had a way with words that is for sure but his words had a way of changing his reader's lives and inspiring, encouraging and helping fans of all ages to feel good about themselves as they grew up reading his wonderful quotes. Here is a collage of 30 Dr. Seuss quotes that can change your life and a list of seven interesting facts about Dr. Seuss you probably did not know, enjoy!
7. Born Theodor Seuss Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 2, 1904, where the future bestseller’s German immigrant father worked in a brewery until it was closed during the Prohibition. As an adult, Dr. Seuss made his childhood neighborhood a household name in his first children's book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.
5. After publishing humorous articles for magazines such as Vanity Fair and Life, Geisel’s first career of creating advertising campaigns for Standard Oil, NBC and General Electric lasted 15 years until the onset of World War II shifted his focus to bigger issues and he began contributing weekly political cartoons to liberal publication PM magazine. He then joined the Army in 1943 as a Captain and Commander of the Cartoon Department of the First Motion Picture Unit, where he fell in love with the art of animation, developing a series of training films featuring a character called Private Snafu.
4. A collection of children's sayings called Boners led to his big break in children’s literature with the eventual publication of And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, after it was rejected a whopping 27 times by Vanguard Press. Geisel and Helen moved to La Jolla, California, and he penned If I Ran the Zoo, Horton Hears a Who! and If I Ran the Circus. Next came the title that would mould the dreams of generations of children to come, when Houghton Mifflin asked Seuss to write and illustrate a book with just 225 "new-reader" vocabulary words and challenged him to "bring back a book children can't put down,” and The Cat In The Hat was born in 1957 to phenomenal success and rave reviews. It was closely followed by How The Grinch Stole Christmas and Green Eggs and Ham, and his latest to make it to the big screen,The Lorax in 1971.
3. Dr. Seuss’ signature style is based on anapestic tetrameter, a poetic meter used by many poets. It consists of four rhythmic units each composed of two weak beats followed by one strong beat, and often the first weak syllable is omitted, or an additional weak syllable is added at the end. A classic example is found in the story, Yertle The Turtle. "And today the Great Yertle, that Marvelous he “Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see.” When it comes to his fabulous illustrations, Dr Seuss’ characters such as the Grinch and the Cat are known for their familiar round and droopy shapes, as are his buildings which melt and bend around free-standing staircases, ramps and platforms.
2. Geisel’s life story wasn’t all about brightly drawn pictures and rhyming verses, it was also marred by tragedy and scandal. After fighting a long battle with cancer and the emotional trauma of her husband’s affair with Audrey Stone Dimond, his wife Helen committed suicide in October 1967, her ‘mourning husband’ married his former mistress six months later. Despite two marriages and a bibliography full of children’s classics, Dr. Seuss never had children of his own, instead living by the motto, "You have 'em; I'll entertain 'em." After several years of bad health, Seuss died of throat cancer on September 24, 1991 at age 81. He was cremated in La Jolla and Dr. Seuss Enterprises was left in the careful hands of ‘Mrs. Seuss,’ Audrey, including the rights to 44 books that had been translated into 15 different languages and sold more than 200 million copies. During his career, he was honored with two Academy Awards, two Emmys, a Peabody and the Pulitzer Prize.
1. Dr. Seuss’ legacy continues to live on in countless modern-day versions of his work, from eleven TV speicals, the Broadway musicals Seussical and The Grinch, to Hollywood blockbusters, The Cat in the Hat with Mike Myers, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas with Jim Carrey, and CGI animated works Horton Hears A Who, and opening Friday, The Lorax. Fans who want to jump into Dr. Seuss’ fantasy world feet-first can visit Seuss Landing at the Island Of Adventures theme park in Orlando, Florida.
