Dr. Seuss was voted “Least Likely to Succeed” by his classmates at Dartmouth College (1921–25).
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, his first children’s book, was rejected 27 times before getting published in 1937.
Dr. Seuss is credited with inventing the word “nerd,” which first appeared in If I Ran the Zoo in 1950.
Green Eggs and Ham was written on a $50 bet when his publisher challenged him to write a book using 50 words or less.
Celebrities who’ve voiced or acted as characters in TV shows and movies based on Dr. Seuss books and stories include Boris Karloff and Jim Carrey (How the Grinch Stole Christmas), Mike Myers (The Cat in the Hat), Danny DeVito (The Lorax) and Jim Carrey, again (Horton Hears a Who!).
The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden in Springfield, Massachusetts, features sculptures of him and many of his characters.
Dr. Seuss comes by his love of verse from his mother, who used to make up rhymes based on pie flavors for him when he was a child.
Before finding success as a children’s author, Dr. Seuss earned his livelihood creating ads for an advertising agency.
At one point, Dr. Seuss’ father ran the local zoo, which is when Dr. Seuss began sketching animals.
Seuss added ‘Dr.’ to his name for his father, who had hoped he would become a medical doctor.
Dr. Seuss liked that “Soose” rhymed with Mother Goose, so he adopted that pronunciation, rather than “Soice,” which is the correct German pronunciation.
From 1943 to 1946, Geisel served as a captain (and ultimately lieutenant colonel) in the animation department of the Army’s 1st Motion Picture Unit and was sent to Hollywood to produce World War II propaganda cartoons featuring the military misadventures of Private Snafu.
After WWII, Seuss and his wife, Helen, lived in an old observation tower on a mountain outside La Jolla, California.
Dr. Seuss’s personalized license plate read “GRINCH.”
After publishing The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 1957, Dr. Seuss began receiving thousands of fan letters—so many that the Random House mailroom began weighing rather than counting the letters. In one year, they reported that Dr. Seuss received 9,267 pounds of mail.
The title character of Yertle the Turtle was based on Adolf Hitler.
Seuss was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, the first person to win for writing children’s books.
After graduating from Dartmouth, he enrolled at the University of Oxford but dropped out in 1927.
Dr. Seuss had no biological children. His second wife, Audrey Dimond, had two daughters.
His influence even reached the scientific community, where an Ecuadorian jumping spider is named after The Loras. The Lapsias lorax has yellow markings near its mouth, which resemble the mustache of its literary counterpart.
Next, 10 Books Parents Can Read to Their Children for Black History Month
