The International Movie Database (IMDb) remains the best single source for information about filmmaking and those who create them. I urge you to check it out.
For example, here is a portion of the information IMDb provides about Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) who was an acclaimed writer. He was born Theodor Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, March 2nd, 1904. After attending Dartmouth College and Oxford University, he began a career in advertising. His advertising cartoons, featuring Quick, Henry, the Flit!, appeared in several leading American magazines. Dr. Seuss‘s first children’s book, titled “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street”, hit the market in 1937, changing the face of children’s literature forever. It was rejected 27 times before it was finally published by Vanguard Press in 1937.
Following World War 2, Geisel and his first wife Helen moved to La Jolla, California, where he wrote and published several children’s books in the coming years, including If I Ran the Zoo and Horton Hears a Who! A major turning point in Geisel’s career came when, in response to a 1954 Life magazine article that criticized children’s reading levels, Houghton Mifflin and Random House asked him to write a children’s primer using 220 vocabulary words. The resulting book, The Cat in the Hat, was published in 1957 and was described by one critic as a “tour de force.” The success of The Cat in the Hat cemented Geisel’s place in children’s literature.
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o Before working on the children’s books that would make him world-famous, he made sculptures of fantastic animals in the form of taxidermist-mounted heads. Some of the creatures’ surreal details would later appear in illustrations in his later books.
o An unpublished 1973 manuscript for
My Many-Colored Days had no illustrations. He wrote that he hoped “a great color artist who will not be dominated by me” would illustrate the book, with a new art style and pattern of thinking. The book was published in 1999 with abstract artwork by Steve Johnson and
Lou Fancher.
o Two of his works have been translated into Latin: The Cat in the Hat (“Cattus Petasatus”) and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (“Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abrogaverit”).
o His first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), was rejected by over 20 publishers.
o Worked as a commercial artist and was known for his humorous spot drawings for many Standard Oil products, most famously Flit bug spray.
o In 1942 he was placed in charge of the Animation Division of the Armed Forces Motion Picture unit by Col.
Frank Capra. Under his administration a series of instructional cartoons featuring the character Private Snafu (an unofficial acronym for “Situation Normal, All [Fouled] Up”) were produced from 1942-45. Snafu’s concept and name were created by Capra, and the character designed by
Arthur Heinemann and
Chuck Jones. Interestingly enough, the voice of Pvt. Snafu is none other than
Mel Blanc, the voice of most of the characters from the Warner Brothers stable. The cartoons were animated by Warner Bros., United Productions of America (UPA) and Harman-Ising Studios. The films had a unique saltiness to dialog and content (with the occasional “Hell” or “Damn”), but since these were instructional films made for the biweekly “Army-Navy Screen Magazine” newsreel, they were exempt from Hays Office restrictions. Although uncredited, Seuss wrote a few of the cartoons, since much of the dialog is written in “Seussian” rhyme, and several characters resemble the illustrations from his books.
A second series of instructional cartoons for the Navy, featuring Private Snafu’s brother, Seaman Tarfu (an acronym for “Things Are Really [Fouled] Up”), was planned, but the end of World War II brought an end to the series, and only one of these shorts was produced. A total of 24 “Private Snafu” shorts were produced.
o Attended and graduated from Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, class of 1925.
o Of his many works, only four could truly be called political.
The Lorax was a parable on short-sighted exploitation of natural resources,
The Butter Battle Book was a commentary on the arms race,
The Sneetches dealt with racism and
Yertle the Turtle himself was representative of
Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
o Was a recluse, spending much of his time alone in his studio.
o Seuss (his mother’s maiden name) is pronounced to rhyme with “voice”–not with “loose”, as it commonly is.
o Supposedly wrote
Green Eggs and Ham on a bet with his publisher,
Bennett Cerf at Random House, to write a book with only 50 words in it. Published in 1957,
Cat in the Hat became his all-time biggest seller. The following year Seuss, Cerf and Cerf’s wife, inspired by the books’ success, began the
Beginner Books series that continues to this day, with entertaining, elementary-level books by Seuss and other authors.
o Pictured on a USA 37¢ commemorative postage stamp, issued March 2, 2004 (100th anniversary of his birth). The stamp also depicts six characters created by him: the Cat in the Hat; the Grinch; the Glotz (or the identical Klotz) from the book Oh Say Can You Say and three characters from the book I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, the Skritz, the unnamed “young fellow”, and the Skrink.
His “Cat in the Hat” is shown on a USA 33¢ commemorative postage stamp, in the sheet of stamps commemorating the 1950s in the Celebrate the Century Series, issued May 26, 1999. The inscription reads “Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat”.
o The University of California-San Diego renamed its main library in 1995 the Geisel Library in honor of him and his wife Audrey, who were La Jolla residents. The library maintains an 8,500-item collection of the works of Dr. Seuss, over a period from 1919-91.
o During the early 1940s he was a political cartoonist for PM, a daily News York newspaper that was noted for its left-wing politics, superior production quality and the fact that it carried no advertising. A book of his political cartoons was published a few years ago.
o During World War II he joined the United States Army and was sent to Hollywood. Capt. Geisel would write for
Frank Capra‘s Signal Corps Unit (for which he won the Legion of Merit) and do documentaries.
As a schoolboy during World War I, his classmates nicknamed him “The Kaiser” due to his German ancestry.
o The music for
The Cat in the Hat Song Book, a book of Seuss-penned lyrics with music for young singers published by Random House, was written by
Eugene Poddany.
o In the late 1980s he wanted to get his book
The Cat in the Hat made into a movie; his choices for the role of the title character were
Robin Williams,
Steve Martin,
John Candy or
Eddie Murphy. In 2003 his book was made into a movie with none of them playing the title character.
o One night while riding home on a train, he saw a pompous, stuffy-looking man with a hat on his head. Seuss wondered what would happen if someone were to knock the hat off his head and then realized the man was so full of himself that another hat would probably appear on his head as a replacement. This inspired Seuss to write The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.
o Despite the famous line from Horton Hears a Who — A person’s a person no matter how small”–being used as a slogan by anti-abortion groups, Seuss himself was a supporter of reproductive rights, and his widow has threatened lawsuits against groups that use this in campaigns.
The film adaptation of “The Lorax” (
The Lorax (2012)) was released on what would have been his 108th birthday.
o Partially based the character of The Grinch on himself, as his house and studio were on a hill in California and, every Christmas, he would look down in disgust at all the cheesy decorations and lights adorning the houses below.
o Although famous for the social and moral messages of his books, he usually didn’t write his books with morals in mind. He preferred to let it grow out from the story, saying, “A kid can see a moral coming a mile away.”.
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Please click here to learn more about the life and work of Theodor Geisel.
Those who have an especially keen interest are urged to check out Brian Jay Jones’s definitive and delightful biography, Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination.
FYI: Amazon now sells a hardbound edition for only $8.99. That’s a 72% discount…and a steal. For some people you know, this book would be an ideal holiday gift.
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The International Movie Database (IMDb) remains the best single source for information about filmmaking and those who create them. I urge you to check it out.