Dr. Seuss

The beloved children's author, Dr. Seuss, was born Theodor Seuss Geisel. He delighted children with his books from the first time he was published in 1937, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street -- a book that was rejected 28 times.

Seuss attended Dartmouth College, where he first began publishing under the "Seuss" pseudonym, his middle name and his mother's maiden name. The use of the pseudonym became necessary after he was kicked off the humor magazine he was editor-in-chief of. He and his friends were caught throwing a drinking party, something that violated Prohibition and school rules. After Dartmouth, he went on to Oxford University with the goal of becoming a professor. While he gave up on that goal, he did meet his future wife, Helen Palmer, a children's author and book editor.

Seuss' most famous book, The Cat in the Hat, was written after Houghton Mifflin asked him to write and illustrate a children's book using only 250 vocabulary words. Seuss pared that down to 225. Along similar lines, Green Eggs and Ham was written on a bet. A colleague bet Seuss that he couldn't write an entire book using only fifty words. The colleague lost.

Theodor Geisel died in September of 1991, but not before becoming the best-known children's book writer ever and the winner of two Academy awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Bibliography

--B. Redman