Theodor Seuss Geisel
AKA Dr. Seuss
Theodor (“Ted”) Seuss Geisel was born on March 2,1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Theodor Robert Geisel and Henrietta Seuss. Geisel attended Dartmouth College where he became the editor in chief of Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth’s humor magazine, until Geisel and his friends were caught throwing a party that did not coincide with school policy and were licked off the paper. Geisel continued to contribute to Jack o, merely signing his work as “Seuss.” This is the first record of his using the pseudonym Seuss. After Dartmouth, Geisel left for Oxford intending to become a professor. It was here, in his Anglo-Saxon for Beginners class, his doodling caught the eye of a fellow American student named Helen Palmer, who suggested that he should become an artist instead of a professor. He took her advice and, eventually, he took her hand in marriage as well.
After college Geisel worked as a cartoonist for The Saturday Evening Pos. He was then offered a staff position with New York weekly. Standard Oil recognized Geisel’s talent and hired him to create ads for products like Flit bug spray. He also Wrote several war and political cartoons for papera snd the U.S. Army.
Viking Press offered Geisel a contract to illustrate a collection of children’s sayings called Boners, which he considered the opportunity his first official “big break” in children’s literature, and another turning point in his career.
Geisel presented his first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Though Mulberry Street to publishers in 1937. Geisel sent his manuscript to 27 publishing houses and received 27 rejections. It wasn't until an old Dartmouth friend, who happened to work at Vanguard Press, a division of Houghton Mifflin, showed the manuscript to Vanguard staff that Geisel book was finally published.
Houghton Mifflin and Random House asked Geisel to write a children’s primer using 220 new-reader vocabulary words; the end result was The Cat in the Hat. This started the well known Beginner Book collection. Which also includes other well know Seuss books like One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, Fox in Sox, Green Eggs and Ham, and Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?.
Though Geisel’s road to children’s books had many twists and turns, The Cat in the Hat catapulted him from pioneer in children’s literature to definitive children’s book author illustrator, a position he has held unofficially for many decades since. Geisel is well known for his unique and imaginary illustrations as well as his poetic meter. Though most of the nooks Geiles wrote were under the pseudonym name Dr. Seuss, Geisel also authored over a dozen books as Theo. LeSieg (Geisel spelled backward) and one as Rosetta Stone. The books he wrote as Theo. LeSieg were not illustrated by Geisel himself, but by several other illustrators.
Theodor Seuss Geisel died on September 24, 1991. Over the course of his long career, Geisel wrote over 60 books. His books have been translated into 15 different languages, and over 222 million copies have found their way into homes and hearts around the world.
Awards:
Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Dartmouth
Oscar for Best Cartoon for Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951)
2 Emmys for Best Children's Special for Halloween Is Grinch Night and The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat (1977 and 1982, respectively)
Pulitzer Prize (1984)
Peabody for the animated specials How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and Horton Hears a Who! (1971)
New York Library Literary Lion (1986)
Three Caldecott Honor Awards for: McElligot’s Pool (1947), Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949), and If I Ran the Zoo (1950).
Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (1980).
Refrences:
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dsads/index.shtml
http://www.seussville.com/seussentennial/resources1.html