The Birth of Dr. Seuss

"The Birth of Dr. Seuss" was hailed as "a quite brilliant critical biography of Dr. Seuss," by Donald Pease, the Dartmouth College Ted & Helen Geisel Professor in the Humanities who recently wrote "Theodor SEUSS Geisel (Lives & Legacies)." Little in this world irritated Ted Geisel, Dr. Seuss’ guardian and alter-ego, more than the needling question: ‘where do you get all those crazy ideas?’ Sometimes he’d snap back, more often than not he’d just laugh and tell you that he didn’t know how to draw and so couldn’t be responsible for what happened on the page, and on a few occasions he let interrogators know that they’d just asked him what was probably the stupidest question ever conceived. Nevertheless, that's what this book sets out to uncover. Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel revolutionized advertising, fought in World War II and won 3 Academy Awards long before becoming famous as a children's author. Voted least likely to succeed by his friends in college, he became one of the best-selling writers of all-time. The Birth of Dr. Seuss offers a glimpse of the unformed class clown and ne'er do well who would grow into the icon so many of us were raised reading. This is an in-depth study of who he was before he was famous with intimations of what set him apart in later life. "The Birth of Dr. Seuss" introduces Theodor Seuss (pronounced "Soice") Geisel, the man behind the Cat in the Hat, the Lorax, Horton and a host of other characters who have made our world a better place.