About this item
Theodor Seuss Geisel, creator of Horton the Elephant, the Grinch, the Cat in the Hat, and a madcap menagerie of the best-loved children’s characters of all time, stands alone as the preeminent figure of children’s literature. But Geisel was a private man who was happier at the drawing table than he was across from any reporter or would-be biographer. Under the thoughtful scrutiny of Charles D. Cohen, Geisel’s lesser known works yield valuable insights into the imaginative and creative processes of one of the 20th century’s most original thinkers.
About the Author
My schooling initially took me from New York to an area outside of Philadelphia, where I was an English major at the uniquely formative Haverford College. But, as the comedian Gallagher once asked, "What are you going to do with an English major if you don't teach--open a Poem Repair? " So it was off to Boston for the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, and finally to Illinois for the orthodontic program at the University of Illinois at Chicago--get an education, see the country.
Wondering where I might want to settle, I first had to rule out Corfu, Greece, which was gorgeous but impractical for someone who could only say "good morning," "good evening," "good night," "thank you very much," and "melon" in Greek and knew nothing about the state of Grecian dentistry (or taxes--how much would be Owed on what a Grecian Earned? ) . So I mused over what was really important to me and decided that I wanted to live somewhere that had four distinct seasons. Taking out a map and compass (the kind with a point and a pencil) , I drew a circle demarcating a two-hour radius with Hartford, CT as the center, then started looking for jobs as a dentist within that circle. I ended up settling Northampton, a liberal community that welcomed the arts in western Massachusetts.
As I established my dental career, I continued to be fascinated and distracted by random things about which that I wanted to know more. I decided that I ought to know something about bourbon, for example, so I tried every different nip of bourbon I encountered and learned as much as I could about them. After about six months, I felt like I knew enough about bourbon and heartburn and it was time to move on to my next curiosity.
Tired of always arguing about who the best baseball players were, I wanted to know who the worst baseball player of all time was. I discovered players like Bill Bergen, whose .170 average and 2 HR over 11 seasons easily enshrined him in the Hall of Infamy--an abysmal offensive career that is unlikely to ever be equaled. But as I continued my little independent study course, I also learned that Bill's brother, Marty, may have had more batting prowess (.265 and 10 HR in just 4 years of professional baseball) , but he more than made up for it by axe-murdering his family and then killing himself with a razor. Naturally, I next had to know whether I could collect baseball cards of the Bergens, which led to research about the history of baseball cards. Again, after about a half a year, I'd learned what I needed to know.
I took many other six-month-sojourns into new realms of folly but, eventually, a time came when I wanted to know something about what Ted Geisel did beyond his famous Dr. Seuss books. The problem was that by the six-month mark, what I'd learned was that no one had yet written the biographies that I had assumed existed a
