He Murdered Dick and Jane

Abstract

During a life that spanned most of the twentieth century, Theodore Geisel worked as an illustrator for advertising campaigns, a political cartoonist for the left-wing magazine PM, an animator for the United States Army during World War II, a playwright, a documentary film maker, and a teacher. He’s best known, of course, as Dr. Seuss, America’s favorite writer of children’s books. By turns silly, sad, smart, and (some said) subversive, his books—which include Green Eggs and Ham (1960), The Cat in the Hat (1957), Horton Hears a Who (1954), One fish two fish red fish blue fish (1960), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957)—have been translated into fifteen languages and have sold more than 200 million copies. When Geisel died in 1991, the New York Times eulogized him for meter and language that “were irresistible, especially the Seuss-speak he created when English seemed too skimpy for so rich an imagination.” Columnist Anna Quindlen predicted that he would always be remembered as a man who “took words and juggled them, twirled them, bounced them off the page.” Geisel made reading fun, she added, and deserves credit for a “mercy killing of the highest order”: the murder of Dick and Jane, the didactic, decidedly un-dynamic duo who had dominated children’s literature for decades.1 Seuss lives on. In 1999, the face of The Cat in the Hat appeared on a U.S. stamp. Five years later, the Postal Service issued a stamp with Geisel’s portrait. In 2002, a Dr. Seuss National Memorial opened in Ted’s hometown, Springfield, Massachusetts. And his books just keep on selling. In Theodor SEUSS Geisel, Donald Pease, a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and American Studies at Dartmouth, assesses Geisel’s life and legacy in a brief biography. Recognizing that half a dozen major works, most notably Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel (1995) by Judith and Neil Morgan, have preceded him, Pease takes Geisel at his word: “Why write about Never-Never Lands that you’ve never seen—when all around—you have a Real Never-Never Land that you know about and understand” (p. 6). He focused instead on the relationship between Geisel’s art and five “decisive turning points” in his life (p. xi).