Over the years, my wife and I have purchased hundreds of copies of Seuss books for our four children, eleven grandchildren, and gifts for most of them to take as gifts to a friend’s birthday party as well as many more for countless nieces and nephews. Yes, they are fun to read to children and fun for them to hear them read. The illustrations could not be better.

Until reading Brian Jay Jones’s biography, however, I did not fully realize how much Theodor Geisel shares in common with Fred Rogers, Jim Henson, Joan Gans Cooney, and Burr Tilstromm (among others) in terms of their determination not to dumb down the material they share with children.

Questions have been raised as to how much Geisel “liked” children. Although he and his two wives had none, it is much more significant — in my mind — that he had such great respect for all children. Here are his thoughts about writing for them. First, he identifies a child’s “Seven Needs”: a need to belong, a need to love and be loved, a need to achieve, a need to know, a need for aesthetic satisfaction, and a need for change. “No juvenile writer can ever hope to get to first base unless he can answer at least one of those needs.”

Moreover, “kids know if you begin to condescend or write down to them. That’s been the trouble with children’s book and elementary textbooks for years…[and] the kids don’t like it. Why should they? The old tellers of fantastic fairy tales, Grimm and Andersen, never talked down to their audiences.”

Also, until reading Becoming Dr. Seuss, I did not full appreciate the nature and extent of Geisel’s brilliant integration of art with commerce. His business acumen was superior…as were his talents for illustration and (for lack of a better term) wordsmithing.

The material in Jones’s biography is organized within 17 chapters, each a key period during Geisel’s extraordinary life. These are among the most significant events:

1904: Born in Springfield, Massachusetts
1921 to 1925: Dartmouth College, and then (briefly) Oxford University and The Louvre
1927: Marries Helen Palmer
1928 until about 1938: Creates successful advertising campaigns
1937: Begins to publish several dozen books with “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street”
1941-1943: Draws Political Cartoons for PM Magazine
1943 Joins the Army (works for and with Frank Capra)
1947: “Design For Death” wins Academy Award for best documentary
1953: Cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing’ released
1957: “The Cat in the Hat” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”
1966: A collaboration with Chuck Jones and others, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” airs on CBS
1967: Wife Helen commits suicide
1968: Marries Audrey Stone Dimond
1971: “The Lorax”
1977: “Halloween Is Grinch Night” on ABC network
1990: “Oh the Places You’ll Go”
1991: Death

No, he never earned a medical degree, nor had he ever aspired to. At one point, years after abandoning his pursuit of a Ph.D. in English, he awarded himself a “Dr.” — no doubt with his tongue firmly in one cheek — and later received an honorary degree from his alma mater, Dartmouth.

Theodor Seuss Geisel died peacefully in his sleep on September 24, 1991, in his studio in La Jolla, Calformia. He was eighty-seven years old. “As for his becoming Dr. Seuss,” Brian Jay Jones observes, “Geisel was content with his legacy. Dr. Seuss, from the moment of his inception, had always been there for one reason.

“‘Just to spread love,’ said Geisel., then broke into a wry smile. ‘How does that sound?'”

My guess is that millions of his younger readers would reply, “totally cool.”