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Summary
Summary
Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon. His work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our own children. More than 25 years after his death, his books continue to find new readers, now grossing over half a billion dollars in sales. His whimsical illustrations and silly, simple rhymes are timeless favourites because, quite simply, he makes us laugh. Theodor Geisel, however, led a life that goes much deeper than the prolific and beloved children's book author. In fact, the allure and fascination of Dr. Seuss begins with this second, more radical side. He had a successful career as a political cartoonist, and his political leanings can be felt throughout his books-remember the environmentalist of The Lorax? He was a complicated man, who introduced generations to the wonders of reading while teaching young people about empathy and how to treat others well.
Author Notes
Born in Kansas and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Brian Jay Jones has a degree in English from the University of New Mexico, which he immediately parlayed into a brief career as a manager of a comic book store before getting into politics and writing. For nearly ten years, he worked as a policy advisor in the United States Senate. He has also served as an associate state superintendent of education for the state of Arizona, a chief of staff for a think tank in Washington, DC, and as a legislative aide for several elected county officials.
Brian currently lives in Virginia with his wife and dog, where he serves as the associate director of the Great Lives biographer speakers program at the University of Mary Washington.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Biographer Jones (George Lucas) delivers a comprehensive and thoughtful look at famed children's author Theodor Geisel (1904-1991). The book's early sections reveal Geisel-Seuss was his mother's maiden name-as an indifferent student who found his calling in humor and drawing, moving from Dartmouth College's Jacko magazine, to advertising, to Frank Capra's Army information unit during WWII. Though he entered children's literature on a fluke-an otherwise restrictive contract with advertising client Standard Oil didn't bar him from it-he soon became convinced of this work's importance. Determined to make reading fun and never talk down to children, he produced his now-familiar classics, with their zany illustrations and tongue-tickling texts. In addition to the fun, however, Geisel did feel compelled to address important issues at times, such as environmentalism in The Lorax. Jones does not ignore problems in Geisel's early work, including some racial stereotypes. He also gives full credit to Geisel's first wife, Helen, as a guiding hand for some of Geisel's best-loved books. While acknowledging Geisel's flaws and debts to others, Jones convincingly shows him as a transformative figure in children's publishing, both as author and cofounder of the Beginner Books imprint. Fans of Dr. Seuss will find much to love in this candid but admiring portrait. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
No, Dr. Seuss did not live on Mulberry Street! Instead, when he was young, Theodor (he dropped the e for some reason) Seuss Geisel resided two miles south on Fairfield Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. Now, more than 100 years later, we have this massive, loving biography, which aims to cover it all: childhood influences on his adult work; his Dartmouth experience; his ad-man years ( Quick, Henry, the FLIT! ), the tepid success of his first five children's books; and the spectacular successes of his later years. Don't expect a lot of critical analysis, though. Jones is more interested in straight reportage. But what about recent Twitterverse allegations that Geisel was a racist? To his credit, Jones acknowledges Geisel's employment of some racial stereotypes in his children's books and editorial cartoons for the newspaper PM, and his lack of female characters. What is not addressed is the current charge that the depiction of The Cat in the Hat was inspired by nineteenth-century minstrel shows. History will be the judge of that, but this biography stands as a straightforward record of Geisel's life and career.--Michael Cart Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AT FIRST, the subtitle of Brian Jay Jones's new life of Dr. Seuss - "Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination" - seems ill chosen. Surely, the newly arriving reader thinks, it ought to be "Theodor Geisel and the Making of the American Imagination," since few authors can have had more influence on the inner workings of the American mind than Geisel, who, in his guise as the good doctor of children's books, reshaped everything from the beat of our doggerel to our notions of the ideal color of eggs and ham. But only halfway through the book the subtitle seems shrewdly chosen, and more than borne out by the material. Geisels sensibility, it turns out, was far more absorbent, and far more pliable, than one would have imagined, turned in many different directions by the winds of his era, and changed again and again by his contact with a kind of all-star roster of mid-20th-century creative exemplars. Unlike most of the great children's book authors and illustrators - Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter - Geisel was not in any way an obsessive or driven visionary, a prisoner of childhood locked in his own imagery or mythology. Instead, he worked (and could have easily stayed in) advertising, animation and political cartooning - to all of which he was, you soon get the sense, more naturally inclined than to what he called, cheerfully, "brat books." (He never had children of his own, nor seems to have liked other people's much. "I like children in the same way that I like people," was his tactful but giveaway standard answer.) Geisel/Seuss, it turns out, made a shrewd though far from cynical decision to write to, though never down to, an audience of children at a moment when that audience was becoming a market - and though his own values and imagination shaped the books he made, his choice to make those kinds of books in the first place turns out in part to have been a response to the new market for them. He was rooted in a place: There's an actual Mulberry Street in Springfield, Mass., where Geisel grew up during the World War I era. His was a German-American family of a kind whose centrality to American experience would later get erased a bit by historical circumstance, but was an extremely strong cultural type - as celebrated by H. L. Mencken - for a long time. His father was a brewer, and Springfield, perhaps most significantly, a place where a culture of German and Yankee ingenuity was very much alive. (Basketball had been invented there in a lucky afternoon.) This spirit of cuckoo-clock engineering and enterprise was dominant for Geisel throughout his life - he was always ready for the new angle, the unexpected entrepreneurial approach to publishing, the sharp commercial play. After good college years at Dartmouth, where his natural style as a hard-edge, fluid-lined cartoonist was already in place, he quickly got to New York, where, in the 1920s, he pursued a joyful life as a freelance cartoonist at a time when that was a real career. From there he made a natural leap into advertising, becoming responsible for the "Quick, Henry! The Flit!" insecticide campaign that older people still smile to remember, and then, eager to find a way out of mere ad-making, in 1941 went to the progressive newspaper PM as their chief editorial cartoonist, where he was bravely anti-Lindbergh and sadly anti-JapaneseAmerican. (The war had ugly effects on Geisel's view of Asians, as it did on so many. In addition to the early anti-Japanese-American cartoons, a later image of a "Chinaman" from "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" has been much condemned, and even eliminated, in its mural form, from the Seuss museum in Springfield. On the other hand, Jones establishes that the civilization of microscopic creatures called "Whos" in "Horton Hears a Who!" was inspired by a 1953 visit Geisel took to Japan and was his way of "offering an open hand of friendship to the Japanese. ... telling them they mattered and deserved to be taken care of in a postwar world.") What's amazing is how completely consistent and identifiable Geisel's style is from first to last and in all his modes, political or commercial, as later in his children's books: the almond-shaped faces caught in wide-eyed emotion - always extreme, startled or snooty - the goofy serpentinenecked and tonsured imaginary animals, with their distinctly emaciated limbs; the slender, animated trees, even the leaping leering chubby fish and the fluorescent palette; you could tell a Seuss page from anyone else's right from the start. (He paid a visit to Paris in 1926, at the height of the pictorial, Miró and Klee phase of the Surrealist movement, and seems to have been affected at least by the license it encouraged.) The early successes landed him an apartment on Park Avenue, but it was only during World War II, when he got pulled into the filmmaking unit of the Signal Corps, that, as Jones shows, he began to become a skilled storyteller. A direct subordinate of no less a figure than the director Frank Capra, he was soon put together with the inspired Looney Times animator Chuck Jones, another instinctive genius. Geisel later credited Capra and Jones together for showing him the virtues of crispness and "conciseness" in storytelling, ones that his naturally prolix imagination instinctively resisted. He soon invented and drew a wide-eyed character, Private Snafu - the name was a once famous acronym - who became the hero of a series of bizarre "instructional" cartoons. The Geisel-Jones Private Snafu cartoons - you can blessedly see a lot of them on YouTlibe - make for hallucinatory watching now, since, though drawn and animated in the classic Warner Brothers, style, they are dense with eroticized female pinups, created to appeal to a G.I. audience. Watching them now is like wandering into the forbidden corners of Bugs Bunny's imagination. Even before the war, Geisel-as-Seuss had won the sponsorship of Bennett Cerf at the new publishing firm Random House, who, in a show of support rare then and almost unknown now, stuck with him through a raft of middling successes in the certainty that Geisel had one big kids' book in him. Sticking with the "brat market," though, Jones makes plain, was also a good business plan. In 1953, Phyllis Jackson, Geisel's literary agent, told him, as Jones recounts it, that "there was something happening in America ... there was a middle class blossoming in the suburbs, and they were all having kids." "The children's market is building," Jackson declared, "and you have a reputation." This enterprise, faltering at first, was set alight the next year by a sudden serendipity. In one of those peculiarly American moments of hand-wringing cultural panic - like the one about video games now, or rap lyrics in the 1980s - pundits in the mid-1950s decided that kids were too drawn to "lurid" comic books instead of dull "school readers," and therefore failing to learn to read, putting us behind in some Cold War competition or another. John Hersey suggested in a worried piece in Life that children's writers like Seuss might be the ones to save kids for reading and from the temptation of the comics, and this vague idea soon became a publishing "concept." Restricted to a 240-word vocabulary, and with the decision to put one picture per page, "The Cat in the Hat" was born. The success of "The Cat in the Hat" - "nothing short of a phenomenon" is how Jones puts it - seemed indeed to counter the lure of the comics. And though one can hardly call Seuss' work equivalently lurid, it is vulgar in the best, positive sense: bracingly direct and unafraid of silliness, obviously easy to enjoy and always unabashedly fun in the first instance. When "Green Eggs and Ham" was published three years later, it was with an even more restricted word count and even wilder comic effect. As so often happens, awkward discipline produced better art; a limited vocabulary produced a more poignantly memorable poetry and constraints made for cultural advance - or at least for a better-selling children's book. The underlying drama of "The Cat in the Hat" - the cat's startling home invasion, taking over the house while Mom is away - is also a reminder that the key to kids' books is often to combine a fascination with anarchy with a taste for the domestic. Something crazy happens and then it stops, safely. (The real genius of the book is the sudden introduction of Thing One and Thing Two, brought in by the Cat and called nothing more, a bit of meta-humor that seems almost postmodern.) Understanding the calculating sources of Dr. Seuss' work doesn't make it less consequential, but it does make it more specific: The note of breezy inconsequence that is part of his books' charm - until he got so big that he became, it seems, a little frozen, made fretful by his own fame - is, one realizes, partly owing to his not being overinvested in their importance. The absence of obvious moralizing, the catch-as-catch-can prosody, the raggedy serendipity of his long-necked and balding birds and animals turn out to spring from someplace deep in his sly and adaptable personality. Commercial motives can sometimes produce work of superior charm. Geisel was already a middleaged man when mega-success hit, and his later life, we learn, was largely productive, though marked by a singular catastrophe. His devoted first wife, Helen, who frequently suffered from poor health - including a bout of Guillain-Barré syndrome that left her temporarily paralyzed, and, later, a minor stroke - committed suicide in 1967 by an overdose of drugs. (Geisel, Jones reveals, had been having an affair with a friend's wife, whom he later married, happily, and the affair may or may not have been causal to Helen's suicide.) By then he was as much a business as an author, with million-dollar contracts for toys and a series of successful television specials. Fitfully political, he eventually won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for a rather obvious anti-nuclear-war allegory called "The Butter Battle Book." jones on the whole spends more time on Seuss' prolific drawing than on his rhyming, a reasonable choice. Geisel was never a painstaking writer of nonsense verse. Lines like "And the Nupboards in the Cupboards. I do like them a lot. But that Nooth Grush on my toothbrush... Well, some are nice but he is not" are easy. Anyone can make rhymes when there are no rules and you get to make up the words; the art of rhyming is in finding actual words in unexpected collisions that resolve in grace. Indeed, Seuss can generally look inelegant compared with his greatest contemporary rivals; place him against Maurice Sendak's mysterious vision and delicately detailed designs, or Charles Schulz's sparely drawn, Chekhovian melancholy, and Seuss looks still like a prewar entertainer. Yet it works. Jones's previous biographies were of Jim Henson and George Lucas, and Geisel seems intuitively a good third to add to the trilogy, or, rather, a foundation for the others. Like the later two men, Geisel was an American master who married shrewd commercial instincts and a weakness for something close to formula with a genuinely overflowing and companionate visual style. It wasn't a bad imagination - indeed, it was a great one; call him Thing Number One! - for America to have made. You could tell a Seuss page from anyone else's from the start. ADAM gopnik is the author, most recently, of "A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism" and has written two fantasies for children, "The King in the Window" and "The Steps Across the Water."
Kirkus Review
A rich, anecdotal biography of one of the bestselling authors in publishing history.Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991), aka Dr. Seuss, created more than 60 books, classified mostly as readers for children. However, as Jones (George Lucas: A Life, 2016, etc.) points out in this engaging, page-turning work of Seuss scholarship, Geisel was writing and illustrating for children and adults simultaneously. Some of his books could be considered in the vanguard of activism about environmental degradation (The Lorax), nuclear war (The Butter Battle Book), and an increasingly geriatric society (You're Only Old Once and Oh, the Places You'll Go). During his Massachusetts childhood and education at Dartmouth and then Oxford, Geisel developed his talent for drawing comic figures; early in his career, he earned his livelihood as a creator of advertisements for commercial products, including an insecticide. The shift to writing books for children occurred gradually, surprising almost everybody, including Geisel himself, who never had children. Used to being perceived as a funny guy, Geisel evolved into a serious thinker about how to develop books that would encourage children to read while also enjoying the learning process. Jones is particularly masterful in this vein, showing how Geisel, his wife, filmmaker/publisher Bennett Cerf, and other key collaborators collectively revolutionized reading education, with Dr. Seuss always reserving the final say. "Nearly thirty years after his death," writes the author, "books by Dr. Seuss still sell as well and as fast as ever, rivaled only by the Harry Potter books by the brilliant J.K. RowlingGeisel's natural heir, as she reignited the same love for books in today's young readers that Dr. Seuss had first sparkedfifty years earlier." Though the narrative is strictly chronological, it never bogs down because the character sketches and publishing anecdotes are so well-rendered, and Jones is especially skillful with foreshadowing. Although sometimes exasperating to work with because of his exacting standards, Geisel comes across as a mostly kind, well-intentioned person.Whether readers are familiar with Dr. Seuss books or not, they will find this biography absorbing and fascinating. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Jones (George Lucas) gets it right in this delightful and informative biography, which details how the widely admired Dr. Seuss emerged from the lesser-known but talented Theodor Geisel (1904-91). The American cartoonist and author's first step toward fame was an ad campaign for a bug spray, but it was his best-selling children's books, especially The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, that made him a household name. Jones notes how Geisel could be a pleasant companion but also a pain in the neck. The near-constant warfare between the artist and Phyllis Cerf (wife of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf) over almost all details of any work published in their Beginner Books line makes for fascinating reading. Jones gives careful attention to the death of Geisel's first wife, Helen, who took her life in 1961, at age 69. A year later he married film producer Audrey Stone, with whom he lived until his death 23 years later, writing and drawing almost to the very end. VERDICT This attractive biography should be on the bedside reading table of thousands of Dr. Seuss lovers, and deservedly so.-David Keymer, Cleveland © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.