What's Up, Doc?

I've certainly been familiar with his books since I was a kid, but until I read Donald Pease's short biography, I knew nothing about Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel's life.

Here are some tidbits:

Dr. Seuss wrote 14 of the 100 top-selling hardcover kids' books, and 26 of the top 200.

Born in 1904 to a prosperous family in Springfield, Massachusetts, the 1910s were not good to him. His father was a German brewer, so WWI meant he was attacked for his ethnicity, and in 1919 Prohibition ended the family business.

At 14 he was set to receive a medal for selling war bonds, to be awarded in a ceremony by former President Teddy Roosevelt. By the time TR got to Geisel, however, he was out of medals and said "what's this little boy doing here?" Geisel, humiliated, was taken off the stage.

Though he crusaded for tolerance most of his adult life, some of his early drawings at Dartmouth employ crude racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Geisel was denied a spot in a fraternity in his first year at Dartmouth because others mistakenly thought he was Jewish.

At Dartmouth, Geisel was initiated into a student group known as "Knights of The Round Table," who later voted him "least likely to succeed."

Caught with alcohol during Prohibition, Geisel was put on probation and removed from editing the Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth's humor magazine. He contributed under pseudonyms, using, for the first time, his mother's maiden name, Seuss.

His mother came from a German family, thus "Seuss" should have been pronounced "soice."

He spent a year at Oxford. He bragged he'd gotten a fellowship, but when that didn't come through, his father liked the idea so much anyway he sold some real estate to pay for his son's year. Geisel didn't like Oxford, but met his wife, Helen there. She was six years older than he, and both mothered him and encouraged him to become a cartoonist.

Geisel became a highly successful ad man in the years before WWII. His most famous work was the series of "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" cartoon/ads.

Some critics complained his first children's book, To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, had no moral.

He worked for Frank Capra's signal corp unit in WWII. He met many other big authors and Hollywood people, including a number of animators he'd work with later.

He regularly published children's books starting in the 1930s, but did not become a major success until he put out The Cat In The Hat in 1957.

His experience working on the film The 5000 Fingers Of Dr. T was so unpleasant he vowed never to work in Hollywood again.

His wife had always taken care of both the household and the business side of his work. He had to learn to manage for himself when she was stricken with Guillain-Barre syndrome in 1954. She had a tracheotomy and spent months in an iron lung, but within a year had recovered.

He almost threw out his story about the Sneetches (some of whom have stars on their bellies) when someone close suggested it was anti-Semitic.

Green Eggs And Ham, which uses less words than any other book of his (which was the whole idea), was his best seller.

In 1964, Helen had a relapse of Guillain-Barre. During this period, he had a romance with Audrey Stone Dimond, a married woman. Helen grew sicker, and, depressed about Geisel's relationship with another woman, committed suicide in 1967. Her suicide note begins "Dear Ted, What has happened to us?"

In his later books, he became more explicitly political, dealing with issue like environmentalism and nuclear war.

Throughout the years his work won Oscars, Emmys and a Pulitzer Prize.