WORDS AND PICTURES MARRIED The Beginnings of DR.SEUSS

A conversation with Theodor S. Geisel

"Dr. Seuss" is of course a pseudonym, one known to millions upon millions of adults and children alike, in the United States and throughout the world.

It derives from the middle name of author-artist Theodor Seuss Geisel '25, and any telling of the story of "Dr. Seuss" must involve a tracing, also, of the career of Geisel himself.

Both born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, he attended Springfield's Central High School, where among his special extracurricular concerns was the student newspaper, the Central Recorder, for which he did articles, verse, humorous squibs, and occasional cartoons, as well as serving as one of the paper's editors.

At the conclusion of his high school yearshe, along with a large number of othersfrom Central High, entered Dartmouth, apparently because of the influence of EdwinA. Smith, a 1917 graduate of the College:

The reason so many kids went to Dartmouth at that particular time from the Springfield high school was probably Red Smith, a young English teacher who, rather than being just an English teacher, was one of the gang - a real stimulating guy who probably was responsible for my starting to write.

I think many kids were excited by this fellow. (His family ran a candy factory in White River Junction, Vermont, I remember that.) And I think when time came to go to college we all said, "Let's go where Red Smith went."

Accordingly, in the autumn of 1921, Geiselheaded for Hanover, some hundred andthirty miles up the Connecticut River fromSpringfield.

And what was to prove, as viewed now inretrospect, especially a stimulus to him atDartmouth?

Well, my big inspiration for writing there was Ben Pressey [W. Benfield Pressey of the Department of English]. He was important to me in college as Smith was in high school.

He seemed to like the stuff I wrote. He was very informal, and he had little seminars at his house (plus a very beautiful wife who served us cocoa). In between sips of cocoa, we students read our trash aloud.

He's the only person I took any creative writing courses from ever, anywhere, and he was very kind and encouraging.

I remember being in a big argument at one of Ben's seminars. I maintained that subject matter wasn't as important as method. (I don't believe that at all now.)

To prove my point, I did a book review of the Boston and Maine Railroad timetable. As I remember, nobody in the class thought it was funny - except Ben and me.

From the outset at Dartmouth, FreshmanGeisel gravitated toward associations withthe humor magazine, Jack O' Lantern:

That was an extension of my activities in high school - and a lot less dangerous than doing somersaults off the ski jump.

I think I had something in Jack O'Lantern within a couple of months after I got to college.

Jack O' Lantern proved increasingly anobject of Geisel's attentions throughout hisfour years in Hanover, and at the end of hisjunior year he became editor-in-chief:

Another guy who was a great encouragement was Norman Maclean. He was the editor preceding me. He found that I was a workhorse, so we used to write practically the whole thing ourselves every month.

Norman, at the same time, was writing a novel. And the further he got involved with his novel, the less time he had for his JackO' Lantern. So, pretty soon I was essentially writing the whole thing myself.

One night Norman finished the novel and went out to celebrate. While he was out celebrating, his boarding house burned down and his novel burned up. Unlike Thomas Carlyle, I don't think he ever rewrote it.

The general practice of Jack O' Lanternwas that its literary content appeared unsigned, a circumstance which renders it impossible to compile today a comprehensivelisting of Geisel's writings for its pages. Theauthor himself has only vague recollectionsof what he in fact wrote for the publication,although he does remember that certaincontributions were written jointly withMaclean, including ones which came aboutin a singular fashion:

Norman and' I had a rather peculiar method of creating literary gems. Hunched behind his typewriter, he would bang out a line of words.

Sometimes he'd tell me what he'd written, sometimes not. But, then, he'd always say, "The next line's yours." And, always, I'd supply it.

This may have made for rough reading. But it was great sport writing.

The art work included in Jack O' Lanternwas, unlike its "lit," usually signed, and themagazine's issues of 1921-1925 areliberally sprinkled with cartoons bearingexplicit evidence of having come from TedGeisel's pen.

The 1920s were seemingly "the era of thepun," and many of the individual cartoonsare found to have involved puns or currentlypopular expressions.

Going back, now, over the pages of Jacko for his undergraduate years, Geisel is ratherstern in his judgment of the cartoons thatwere included, and particularly of those hehimself drew. .

In summing up his assessment he says:

You have to look at these things in the perspective of 50 years ago. These things may have been considered funny then, I hope „ — but today I sort of wonder.

The best I can say about the Jacko of this era is that they were doing just as badly on the Harvard Lampoon, the Yale Record, and the Columbia Jester.

During his student days Geisel also wentinto print from time to time in another campus publication, The Dartmouth,"America's Oldest College Newspaper":

Whit Campbell was editor of The DailyDartmouth at the time. I filled-in occasionally and did a few journalistic squibs with him.

Almost every night I'd be working in the Jack O' Lantern office, and while waiting for Whit's morning paper across the hall to 20 to press, we used to play a bit of poker.

Once in a while, if one of Whit's news stories turned sour, we'd put our royalstraight flushes face down on the table, rewrite the story together, and then pick up our royal-straight flushes again - and sometimes raise each other as much as a quarter.

This did little to affect the history of journalism in America. But it did cement the strongest personal friendship I made at Dartmouth.

There were two especially noteworthyaspects of the extensive work Geisel did forDartmouth's humor magazine.

The first of these emerged during hisjunior year, and he identifies it as havingbeen in his undergraduate period "the onlyclue to my future life." It involved atechnique of presentation, the approach to aform for combining humorous writing andzany drawings:

This was the year I discovered the excitement of "marrying" words to pictures.

I began to get it through my skull that words and pictures were Yin and Yan. I began thinking that words and pictures, married, might possibly produce a progeny more interesting than either parent.

It took me almost a quarter of a century to find the proper way to get my words and pictures married. At Dartmouth I couldn't even get them engaged.

The other particularly significant feature ofGeisei's Jack O' Lantern career relates tothe spring of 1925, when apparently he firstused the signature "Seuss." The circumstances that surrounded his employment ]of the later-famous pseudonym he outlines as follows:

The night before Easter of my senior year there were ten of us gathered in my room at the Randall Club. We had a pint of gin for ten people, so that proves nobody was really drinking.

But Pa Randall, who hated merriment, called Chief Rood, the chief of police, and he himself in person raided us.

We all had to go before the dean, Craven Laycock, and we were all put on probation for defying the laws of Prohibition, and especially on Easter Evening.

The disciplinary action imposed by Dean Laycock meant that the editor-in-chief ofJack O' Lantern was relieved forthwith ofhis official responsibilities for running themagazine. There existed, however, thepractical necessity of helping to bring outits succeeding numbers during theremainder of the academic year.

Articles and jokes presented no problem,since they normally appeared anonymously;thus, anything the deposed editor might doin that area could be completely invisible asto its source.

Cartoons, on the other hand, usually being signed contributions, did present adilemma; and it was a dilemma TheodorSeuss Geisel resolved by publishing some ofhis cartoons entirely without signature andby attributing others of them to fictitioussources.

The final four Jacko issues in the springof 1925 contained, accordingly, a number ofGeisel cartoons anonymously inserted orcarrying utterly fanciful cognomens (suchas "L. Burbank," "Thos. Mott Osborne'27," and "D. G. Rossetti '25"), and twocartoons, in the number of April twenty-second, had affixed to them his own middlename (in one case "Seuss" alone and in theother "T. Seuss"):

To what extent this corny subterfuge fooled the dean, I never found out. But that's how "Seuss" first came to be used as my signature. The "Dr." was added later on.

In June of 1925, Ted Geisel finished his undergraduate course at Dartmouth andprepared to embark upon a furtheracademic adventure. It was one he hadardently desired to pursue, but it proved, inthe end, to have a slightly different route ofapproach than he had anticipated:

I remember my father writing me and asking, "What are you going to do after you graduate?"

I wrote back, "Don't you worry about me, I'm going to win a thing called the Campbell Fellowship in English Literature and I'm going to Oxford."

He read the letter rather hurriedly. The editor of the Springfield Union lived across the street from us (that was Maurice Sherman; he was also a Dartmouth man), and my father ran across the street and said, "Hey, what do you know? Ted won a fellowship called the Campbell Fellowship and he's going to Oxford."

So, Maurice Sherman, being a staunch Dartmouth man, ran my picture in the paper (I think it was on the front page): GEISEL WINS FELLOWSHIP TO GO TO OXFORD. And everybody called up my father and congratulated him.

Well, it so happened that that year they found nobody in the College worthy of giving the Campbell Fellowship to. So, my father, to save face with Maurice Sherman and others, had to dig up the money to send me to Oxford, anyway.

In the autumn of 1925 Geisel entered Oxford as a member of Lincoln College:

My tutor was A. J. Carlyle, the nephew of the great, frightening Thomas Carlyle. I was surprised to see him alive. He was surprised to see me in any form.

He was the oldest man I've ever seen riding a bicycle. I was the only man he'd ever seen who never ever should have come to Oxford.

This brilliant scholar had taken "Firsts" in every school in Oxford, excepting medicine, without studying. Every year, up to his eighties, he went up for a different "First," just for the hell of it.

Patiently, he had me write essays and listened to me read them, in the usual manner of the Oxford tutorial system. But he realized I was getting stultified in English schools.

I was bogged down with old High German and Gothic and stuff of that sort, in which I have no interest whatsoever - and I don't think anybody really should.

Well, he was a great historian, and he quickly discovered that I didn't know any history. Somehow or other I got through high school and Dartmouth without taking one history course.

He very correctly told me I was ignorant, and he was the man who suggested that I do what I finally did: just travel around Europe with a bundle of high school history books and visit the places I was reading about - go to the museums and look at pictures and read as I went. That's what I finally did.

As an example of one factor contributing tothe stultifying atmosphere he encounteredat Oxford, he still has vivid memories of adon at the university who had produced avariorum edition of Shakespeare and whowas chiefly interested in punctuationaldifferences in Shakespearean texts:

That was the man who really drove me out of Oxford. I'll never forget his two-hour lecture on the punctuation of KingLear.

He had dug up all of the old folios, as far back as he could go. Some had more semicolons than commas. Some had more commas than periods. Some had no punctuation at all.

"For the first hour and a half he talked about the first two pages in King Lear, lamenting the fact that modern people would never comprehend the true essence of Shakespeare, because it's punctuated badly these days.

It got unbelievable. I got up, went back to my room, and started packing.

A notebook used by Geisel during his timeat Oxford has survived among his papers:

I think this demonstrates that I wasn't very interested in the subtle niceties and complexities of English literature. As you go through the notebook, there's a growing incidence of flying cows and strange beasts. And, finally, at the last page of the notebook there are no notes on English literature at all. There are just strange beasts.

This period, despite its academic frustrations, was not, however, without its diversions and recreations - one such having been, actually, an outgrowth ofMiltonic studies:

While I was at Oxford I illustrated a great hunk of Paradise Lost.

With the imagery of Paradise Lost, Milton's sense of humor failed him in a couple of places. I remember one line, "Thither came the angel Uriel, sliding down a sunbeam."

I illustrated that: Uriel had a long, locomotive oil can and was greasing the sunbeam as he descended, to lessen the friction on his coccyx. And I worked a lot on Adam and Eve.

Blackwell, the great bookseller and publisher, was right around the corner from Lincoln, and I remember I had the crust to go in there and ask them to commission me to do the whole thing.

Somebody took it into a back room and then came back with it very promptly and said, "This isn't quite the Blackwell type of humor."

So, I was thrown out. But I got my revenge years later.

I went to Oxford about 20 years later. I went past Blackwell's and found the whole window full of my books. It had apparently become "the Blackwell type of humor."

Clearly, the most important circumstanceassociated with Ted Geisel's interval at theUniversity of Oxford was his meeting therea young lady from New Jersey namedHelen Palmer.

A graduate of Wellesley College, MissPalmer had in the autumn of 1924 enteredupon studies at Oxford to complete herpreparations for becoming a schoolteacherback home in America:

She was a gal who was sitting next to me when I was doing this notebook, and she was the one who said, "You're not very interested in the lectures." (She "picked me up" by looking over and saying, "I think that's a very good flying cow.")

It was she who finally convinced me that flying cows were a better future than tracing long and short E through Anglo Saxon.

She was the one who convinced me that I wasn't for pedagogy at all.

On the other hand, she did complete the English schools that year; took her degree in English Lit. This enabled her to get a job teaching English in the States. This enabled us to get married.

Upon quitting Oxford, Geisel did engagebriefly in one final scholastic interlude, thistime in Paris:

At Oxford I went to a lecture (I was very interested in Jonathan Swift) by the great Emil Legouis. Although he was a Frenchman, he was the greatest Swift authority in the world at that time.

He talked to me at the end of the lecture and began selling me on going to study with him at the Sorbonne. And, after I left Oxford, I did so.

I registered at the Sorbonne, and I went over to his house to find out exactly what he wanted me to do.

He said, "I have a most interesting assignment which should only take you about two years to complete." He said that nobody had ever discovered anything that Jonathan Swift wrote from the age of 16 and a half to 17.

He said I should devote two years to finding out whether he had written anything. If he had, I could analyze what he wrote as my D.Phil, thesis. Unfortunately, if he hadn't written anything, I wouldn't get my doctorate.

I remember leaving his charming home and walking straight to the American Express Company and booking myself a passage on a cattle boat to Corsica.

There I proceeded to paint donkeys for a month. Then, I proceeded with Carlyle's idea and began living all around the Continent, reading history books, going to museums, and drawing pictures.

I remember a long period in which I drew nothing but gargoyles. They were easier than Mona Lisas.

And what of those months of junketing? -

While floating around Europe trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I decided at one point that I would be the Great American Novelist. And so I sat down and wrote the Great American Novel.

It turned out to be not so great, so I boiled it down into the Great American Short Story. It wasn't very great in that form either.

Two years later I boiled it down once roore and sold it as a two-line joke to Judge.

Home once again in Springfield, Geisellived with his parents and began submittingcartoons to national magazines:

I was trying to become self-sufficient - and my father was hoping I'd become selfsufficient and get out of the house, because I was working at his desk.

Finally, a submission to The SaturdayEvening Post was accepted. It was a cartoon depicting two tourists on a camel, andit appeared in the magazine's issue for July 16, 1927.

The drawing was signed simply "Seuss" by its draftsman-humorist, resurrecting the pseudonym he had used in the DartmouthJack O' Lantern two years earlier:

The main reason that I picked "Seuss" professionally is that I still thought I was one day going to write the Great American Novel. I was saving my real name for that - and it looks like I still am.

Actually, the Post in publishing his cartoon accorded "Seuss" no pseudonymity whatsoever, for it supplied the identification "Drawn by Theodor Seuss Geisel" in a byline of type, right along the edge of the drawing itself.

When the Post paid me 25 bucks for that picture, I informed my parents that my future success was assured; I would quickly make my fame and fortune in TheSaturday Evening Post.

It didn't quite work out that way. It took 37 years before they bought a second Seuss: an article in 1964 called "If At First You Don't Succeed - Quit!"

But success during the summer of 1927 in placing something with The SaturdayEvening Post was a cause for great elation- and, moreover, for a decision on the cartoonist's part to leave Springfield:

Bubbling over with self-assurance, I told my parents they no longer had to feed or clothe me.

I had a thousand dollars saved up from the Jack O' Lantern (in those days college magazines made a profit), and with this I jumped onto the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad; and I invaded the Big City, where I knew that all the editors would be waiting to buy my wares.

In New York, Geisel moved in with an artistfriend from his Dartmouth undergraduate days, John C. Rose, who had a one-room studio in Greenwich Village, upstairs over Don Dickerman's night club called thePirates Den:

The last thing we used to do at night was to stand on chairs and, with canes we'd bought for that purpose, play polo with the rats, and try to drive them out so they wouldn't nibble us while we slept. God! what a place.

And I wasn't selling any wares. I tried to do sophisticated things for Vanity Fair; I tried unsophisticated things for the DailyMirror.

I wasn't getting anywhere at all, until John suddenly said one day, "There's a guy called Beef Vernon, of my class at Dartmouth, who has just landed a job as a salesman to sell advertising for Judge.

"His job won't last long, because nobody buys any advertising in Judge. But maybe, before Beef gets fired, we can con him into introducing you to Norman Anthony, the editor."

The result of the Geisel-Anthony meetingwas the offer of a job as a staff writer-artistfor the humor magazine, at a salary of 75dollars per week - enough encouragementto cause Ted Geisel and Helen Palmer (whohad been teaching during the year since thecompletion of her Oxford studies) to marry.The wedding took place at Westfield, NewJersey, on November 29, 1927:

We got married on the strength of that. Then the magazine went semi-bust the next week, and my salary went down to 50 dollars.

And the next week ihey instituted another fiscal policy (I was getting a little bit worried by this time) in which they dispensed with money entirely and paid contributors with due bills. Due bills . . . ?

Judge had practically no advertising. And the advertisers it attracted seldom paid for the ads with money; they paid the magazine with due bills. And that's what we, the artists and writers, ended up with in lieu of salary.

For instance: a hundred dollars, the only way for me to get the hundred dollars was to go down to the Hotel Traymore in Atlantic City and move into a hundreddollar suite.

So, Helen and I spent many weeks of our first married year in sumptuous suites in Atlantic City - where we didn't want to be at all.

Under the due-bill system I got paid once, believe it or not, in a hundred cartons of Barbasol shaving cream. Another time I got paid in 13 gross of Little Gem nail clippers.

Looking back on it, it wasn't really so bad, because I didn't have to balance any checkbooks - or file any income tax.

How can you file an income tax when you're being paid in cases of White Rock soda?

And where did the newlywed Geisels set uphousekeeping in New York?

Oh, we went to a place across from a stable in Hell's Kitchen on 18th Street.

Horses frequently died in the stable, and they'd drag them out and leave them in the street, where they'd be picked up by sanitation two or three days later.

That's where I learned to carry a "loaded" cane. It was about a three-block walk to the subway. If you weren't carrying a weapon of some sort you'd be sure to get mugged.

So, Helen and I worked harder than ever to get out of this place, and we finally managed to move north to 79th Street and West End Avenue. There there were many fewer dead horses.

"Seuss" work in Judge consisted not onlyof cartoons:

I was writing some crazy stories, as well. It was a combination, about fifty-fifty, the articles always tied in with drawings.

Among these combination pieces, extendingthe type of thing he had begun doing as anundergraduate at Dartmouth, Geiselproduced for Judge a succession of regularcontributions signed in a way that broughthis pseudonym into the final form of itsevolution:

I started to do a feature called "Boids and Beasties." It was a mock-zoological thing, and I put the "Dr." on the "Seuss" to make me sound more professorial.

At first the self-bestowed "Dr." was accompanied by "Theophrastus" or "Theo."in by-lines and as a signature for drawings,but with the passage of time "Dr. Seuss"was settled on as the standard form of hisidentification.

"Dr. Seuss" soon found his way into othermagazines of the day, besides Judge, including Liberty, College Humor, and Life.He even teamed up, at one point, withhumorist Corey Ford in a collaboration forVanity Fair that was, in the end, to beabandoned out of pure frustration:

I illustrated some stories for Corey Ford in Vanity Fair, but I gave that up because it got a little ludicrous. The art director of Vanity Fair was more concerned with style than content.

The last thing I did with Corey was a spoof on political cartooning in the 1890s - a Boss Tweed type thing.

The art director laid the thing out before I did the drawings, and he insisted that my average picture was to be nine inches wide and three-quarters of an inch high. This caused Boss Tweed and me to roll over in our graves.

Corey and I remained good friends, but we didn't work together after that.

An occurrence early in Geisel's period ofassociation with Judge was to have a par-ticular impact on his subsequent career:

I'd been working for Judge about four months when I drew this accidental cartoon which changed my whole life. It was an insecticide gag.

It was a picture of a knight who had gone to bed. He had stacked his armor beside the bed. There was this covered canopy over the bed, and a tremendous dragon was sort of nuzzling him.

He looked up and said, "Darn it all, another Dragon. And just after I'd sprayed the whole castle with. ..."

With what? I wondered.

There were two well-known insecticides. One was Flit and one was Fly Tox. So, I tossed a coin. It came up heads, for Flit.

So, the caption read, "... another Dragon. And just after I'd sprayed the whole castle with Flit."

Here's where luck comes in.

Very few people ever bought Judge. It was continually in bankruptcy - and everybody else was bankrupt, too.

But one day the wife of Lincoln L. Cleaves, who was the account executive on Flit at the McCann-Erikson advertising agency, failed to get an appointment at her favorite hairdresser and went to a secondrate hairdresser's, where they had secondrate magazines around.

She opened Judge while waiting to get her hair dressed, and she found this pic- ture. She ripped it out of the magazine, put it in her reticule, took it home, bearded her husband with it, and said, "Lincoln, you've got to hire this young man; it's the best Flit ad I've ever seen."

He said, "Go away." He said, "You're my wife, and you're to have nothing to do with my business."

So, she pestered him for about two weeks, and finally he said, "All right, I'll have him in, and I'll buy one picture."

He had me in. I drew one picture, which I captioned "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" - and it was published.

Then, they hired me to do two more - and 17 years later I was still doing them.

The only good thing Adolph Hitler did in starting World War II was that he enabled me to join the Army and finally stop drawing "Quick, Henry, the Flit!"

I'd drawn them by the millions - newspaper ads, magazine ads, booklets, window displays, 24-sheet posters, even "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" animated cartoons. Flit was pouring out of my ears and beginning to itch me.

The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey,the manufacturers of Flit, had anotherproduct with which Geisel was to becomeconcerned, in an ad campaign that led tosomething of a naval career for "Dr.Seuss":

They had a product called Esso Marine, a lubricating oil for boats, and they didn't have a lot of money to spend on advertising.

They decided to see what we could do with public relations. So, Harry Bruno, a great PR man, Ted Cook and Verne Carrier of Esso, and I cooked up the Seuss Navy.

Starting small at one of the New York motorboat shows, we printed up a few diplomas, and we took about 15 prominent people into membership - Vincent Astor and sailors like that, who had tremendous yachts - so we could photograph them at the boat show receiving their certificates.

We waited to see what happened. Well, Astor and Guy Lombardo and a few other celebrities hung these things in their yachts. And very soon everyone who had a putt-putt wanted to join the Seuss Navy.

The next year we started giving annual banquets at the Biltmore. It was cheaper to give a party for a few thousand people, furnishing all the booze, than it was to advertise in full-page ads.

And it was successful because we never mentioned the product at all. Reporters would cover the party, and they would write our commercials for us. So, we would end up with national coverage about "The Seuss Navy met. . . ," and then they would have to explain it by talking about Esso Marine.

At the time war was declared, in 1941, we had the biggest navy in the world. We commissioned the whole Standard Oil fleet, and we also had, for example, the Queen Mary and most of the ships of the U.S. lines.

Then, an interesting thing happened. I left to join the Army. And somebody said, "Thank God, Geisel's gone, he was wasting a great opportunity. He wasn't selling the product. We have Seuss Navy hats, and we have Seuss Navy glasses and Seuss Navy flags." He said, "These things should carry advertising on them."

They put advertising on them, and the Navy promptly died. The fun had gone out of it, and the Seuss Navy sank.

Concurrently with his advertising andpromotional activity relating to Flit andEsso Marine, "Dr. Seuss" continued tocontribute to the humor magazines; but hewas not entirely free:

My contract with the Standard Oil Company was an exclusive one and forbade me from doing an awful lot of stuff.

Flit being seasonal, its ad campaign was only run during the summer months. I'd get my year's work done in about three months, and I had all this spare time and nothing to do.

They let me work for magazines, because I'd already established that. But it crimped future expansion into other things.

Restless to explore new avenues of activity,Geisel ultimately hit upon the notion ofpreparing a volume for children:

I would like to say I went into children's-book.work because of my great understanding of children. I went in because it wasn't excluded by my Standard Oil contract.

Another evident cause for his focusing on the possibility of doing books at some point was a commission he received to provide "Dr. Seuss" illustrations for an anthology of amusing gaffes unconsciously and innocently perpetrated by school children, a work that styled itself as "compiled from classrooms and examination papers" by Alexander Abingdon:

The book was originally published in England, where it was called SchoolboyHowlers. Some smart person at Viking Press in New York (I think it was Marshall Best) brought out a reprint of the English edition, under the title Boners.

Whereupon hundreds of teachers in the U S.A. began sending in boners from their examination papers. And the Boner Business boomed.

Boners and its sequel, More Boners, wereboth published in 1931:

That was a big Depression year. And although by Depression standards I was adequately paid a flat fee for illustrating these bestsellers, I was money-worried. The two books were booming and I was not.

This is the point when I first began to realize that if I hoped to succeed in the book world, I'd have to write, as well as draw.

The actual coming into being of a book of his own, the first of what was to be so substantia! and celebrated a series of volumes written and illustrated by "Dr. Seuss," derived from a curious stimulus and through decidedly unusual means:

I was on a long, stormy crossing of the Atlantic, and it was too rough to go out on deck. Everybody in the ship just sat in the bar for a week, listening to the engines turn over: da-da-ta-ta, da-da-ta-ta, da-da-ta-ta. . . .

To keep from going nuts, I began reciting silly words to the rhythm of the engines. Out of nowhere I found myself saying, "And that is a story that no one can beat; and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street."

When I finally got off the ship, this refrain kept going through my head. I couldn't shake it. To therapeutize myself I added more words in the same rhythm.

Six months later I found I had a book on my hands, called And to Think That I SawIt on Mulberry Street. So, what to do with it?

I submitted it to 27 publishers. It was turned down by all 27. The main reason they all gave was there was nothing similar on the market, so of course it wouldn't sell.

After the 27th publisher had turned it down, I was taking the book home to my apartment, to burn it in the incinerator, and I bumped into Mike McClintock (Marshall McClintock, Dartmouth 1926) coming down Madison Avenue.

He said, "What's that under your arm?"

I said, "That's a book that no one will publish. I'm lugging it home to burn."

Then I asked Mike, "What are you doing?"

He said, "This morning I was appointed juvenile editor of Vanguard Press, and we happen to be standing in front of my office; would you like to come inside?"

So, we went inside, and he looked at the book and he took me to the president of Vanguard Press. Twenty minutes later we were signing contracts.

That's one of the reasons I believe in luck. If I'd been going down the other side of Madison Avenue, I would be in the dry-cleaning business today!

And what reception did the public accordAnd to Think That I Saw It on MulberryStreet when the book was released in 1937?

In those days children's books didn't sell very well, and it became a bestseller at 10,000 copies, believe it or not. (Today, at "Beginner Books," if we're bringing out a doubtful book we print 20,000 copies.)

But, we were in the Depression era, and Mulberry Street cost a dollar, which was then a lot of money.

I remember what a big day it was in my life when Mike McClintock called up and announced, "I just sold a thousand copies of ' your book to Marshall Field. Congratulations! You are an author."

In addition to favorable sales, the commentof one particular reviewer was especiallysignificant in encouraging the fledglingauthor of children's books toward furthereffort in this new-to-him field:

Clifton Fadiman, I think, was partially responsible for my going on in children's books. He wrote a review for The NewYorker, a one-sentence review.

He said, "They say it's for children, but better get a copy for yourself and marvel at the good Dr. Seuss's impossible pictures and the moral tale of the little boy who exaggerated not wisely but too well."

I remember that impressed me very much: if the great Kip Fadiman likes it I'll have to do another.

Another he did do (The 500 Hats ofBartholomew Cubbins, in 1938) and thenanother and another and another - to thepoint that there have been to date nearly 50volumes of his authorship, in addition towidely acclaimed motion pictures andanimated specials for television. Besidesthis Theodor Seuss Geisel presides over andgives editorial direction to a majorpublishing enterprise, "Beginner Books," adivision of Random House.

In 1955 Ted Geisel returned to Dartmouth in order that his alma mater might,fondly and proudly, bestow upon him anhonorary degree. President John SloanDickey's citation on that occasionproclaimed, in part:

"Your affinity for flying elephants and man-eating mosquitoes makes us rejoice you were not around to be Director of Admissions on Mr. Noah's ark. But our rejoicing in your career is far more positive: as author and artist you single-handedly have stood as St. George between a generation of exhausted parents and the demon dragon of unexhausted children on a rainy day.... As always with the best of humor, behind the fun there has been intelligence, kindness, and a feel for humankind."

from . . . Mulberry Street (1937)

"Seuss" is bom in The Jack O'Lantern (1925).

"Flying cows (above) and strange beasts" —from the Oxford notebooks.

"Flying cows (above) and strange beasts" —from the Oxford notebooks.

MDELENAL TENANT—Darn it all, another Dragon. And justafter I'd sprayed the whole eastle with Flit!