What you really want to do is draw…” They later got engaged and married and he dropped out of school to become a cartoonist, primarily working in advertising for the next thirty years as his principle way to earn money. He met her in college with her telling him: “You’re crazy to be a professor. Geisel’s first wife, Helen Palmer Geisel was the one who originally convinced him to drop out of the PhD program at Oxford and pursue becoming a cartoonist.The “Theo” is short for “Theodor”, which is first name, and “LeSieg” is “Geisel” spelled backwards. Geisel had an alternate pen name that he also wrote under which was Theo LeSieg.Theophrastus Seuss”, which subsequently was shortened to “Dr. He subsequently started publishing under various pen names, including T. Geisel first used the pen name “Seuss” in college after being removed as the editor of the Dartmouth College’s humor magazine “Jack-O-Lantern” and being banned from writing for that magazine due to being caught drinking by the dean in 1925.However, due to the fact that most Americans pronounced it incorrectly as “Soose”, Geisel later gave in and stopped correcting people, even quipping the mispronunciation was a good thing because it is “advantageous for an author of children’s books to be associated with- Mother Goose.” The proper pronunciation of “Seuss” is actually “Zoice” (rhymes with “voice”), being a Bavarian name.Interestingly, he did eventually receive several honorary doctorates, more or less managing to receive a PhD by dropping out of school. “Seuss” was his mother’s maiden name as well as his own middle name. Seuss” was in homage to Geisel’s father’s hope that his son would get his PhD, which he failed to achieve after dropping out of the PhD program at Oxford where he was pursuing a PhD in English. Rogers was an Ordained Presbyterian Minister and Other Interesting Mr. Where the Words “Geek” and “Nerd” Came From.If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show ( iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as: In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on Earth. With his books, he not only wanted to help kids learn to read in an enjoyable way, but he also wanted to “teach them how to think”, which he felt was particularly important as he stated:Ĭhildren’s reading and children’s thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. The Cat in the Hat was published in 1957 and went on to sell around one million copies in the first three years after being published, allowing Geisel to stop working in advertising and to focus on writing children’s books. Geisel then looked through the list of words and spotted “hat”, which obviously rhymed with “cat”, so decided to make a story out of that instead. The original story itself was supposed to be about a King cat and a Queen cat, but “queen” wasn’t on the list of acceptable words. Geisel nearly succeeded, using 236 unique words in the story, though the endeavor took him nine months largely due to the word restriction. At the time, children were reading primers like “ Fun with Dick and Jane“, which are anything but fun and don’t inspire kids to want to read outside of what they are required.Īs a response to this, William Spaulding, director of Houghton Mifflin’s educational division, challenged Geisel to “write a story that first-graders can’t put down” and asked that it be limited to 225 distinct words from a list of 348 words that were selected from a standard first grader’s vocabulary list. John Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, wrote a piece in a issue of Life magazine titled, “Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading.” which was extremely critical of school primers. Geisel’s first successful children’s book, Cat in the Hat, also was the result of a challenge to write a book in under a certain number of words. Green Eggs and Ham went on to be Geisel’s best selling work, so he made out on it anyways. Theodore Geisel, winning the bet by producing one of his most popular works Green Eggs and Ham using exactly 50 unique words, Cerf never paid up. The bet was made in 1960 with Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House, and was for $50 (about $382 today). Seuss wrote “Green Eggs and Ham” on a bet that he couldn’t write a book with fifty or fewer distinct words.
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