With his crinkly soft eyes, his grandly equine nose, and the grin that speaks of amiable inner demons, he looks as though he has stepped from his own drawing board.
When you encounter Theodor Geisel, you can easily relate him with two words warmly familiar to millions of children and parents the world over. The two words? Dr. Seuss.
They are one and the same--Ted Geisel of La Jolla, California, and Dr. Seuss, the pseudonym he has employed for over fifty years while writing and illustrating his approximately 45 children's books--and two or three for grown-ups--that have sold more than 100 million copies, and have been translated into twenty languages.
To the delight of his fans, the first major retrospective of Seuss' career was assembled by the San Diego Museum of Art last year. Entitled "Dr. Seuss from Then to Now," the exhibition included Seussian works dating back to his days as editor in chief of the Dartmouth College comic monthly, "Jack-o-Lantern." The exhibit wowed the folks in San Diego and went on a national tour that will conclude in April 1988, in the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Four years ago, Dr. Seuss was given a special Pulitzer Prize, which could be added to his previous honors--the Peabody, broadcasting's equivalent of the Pulitzer, and the Oscar. With these three top awards, Seuss may be said to have achieved the hat trick--hockey jargon for one who scored three goals in a game--or, for Seuss, the cat in the hat trick.
Birth of The Cat in the Hat
Seuss has a curious affinity with cats. On the door to the hilltop home that Ted shares with his wife of eighteen years is a small printed sign that warns, with typical Seussian waggishness, "Beware of the Cat."
There are, however, no cats in the household, unless one counts the four hundred or so feline specimens in his various paintings. One painting contains a cluster of perhaps two hundred faces of cats. Ted calls it, appropriately, "A Plethora of Cats." "The truth," he says, "is that I like dogs better than cats, but I don't know how to draw a dog."
It was a cat drawing that led Geisel into the area of children's books. In the mid 1950s, when parents grew concerned that Johnny couldn't read, Geisel's publisher urged him to fill the void with a book for six-year-olds. The story would be limited to a prescribed list of words, all of one syllable.
After months of helpless thrashing, Geisel was rummaging through his discarded sketches when he saw a drawing of a rogue-ish looking cat. It was a true Seussian cat, wearing a rakish stovepipe hat. Since both "cat" and "hat" were on the word list, Geisel parlayed them into The Cat in the Hat, a comic masterpiece now a supplementary text for first-graders.
Geisel's feeling for animals can be traced to his boyhood in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was born on March 4, 1904. His father's duties as supervisor of public parks included the overseeing of the city's zoo. Young Ted and his sister enjoyed romping with the animals and they
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