Theodor Seuss Geisel

Dr.  Seuss has been an interesting person to me for awhile.  The past couple of years in March I have shared with students a couple of biographies of him.  I have been surprised to learn that he got his start as an artist, not a writer (OK, that probably shouldn't be surprising); that his drawings were initially badly received, and that he was once voted "Least Likely to Succeed" in school due to his propensity to goof off.

He was not necessarily a role model for elementary school students, and I have told them that "most people will not be a Dr. Seuss, so do your school work."

He seems like he'd be a fun friend though.

This year during Read Across America Week I read to students from The Bippolo Seed, a collection of his lost stories published in 2011, twenty years after his death.  The short story with the same name is a lesson on greed, in which a duck loses his chance to make wishes using a bippolo seed by choosing wishes so grandiose that his excitement causes him to drop the seed in the river.  Gustav the Goldfish is about a fish that grows into the size of a whale after being fed too much fish food.  These stories were originally published in Redbook magazine in the 1950s.

Kids always refer to Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat and Wacky Wednesday when asked for favorites.  Mine include his more serious later work, The Lorax and Oh! The Places You'll Go, as well as the very silly Gerald McBoing-Boing, who "doesn't speak words, he goes 'boing boing' instead.

Serious or silly, Dr. Seuss is fun to read aloud.

When he died in 1991, I was on staff at my college newspaper.  We borrowed a very well-drawn cartoon of the Cat in the Hat mourning over a grave.  I have had no luck finding that cartoon since then but even as someone who had not formed aspirations to be a librarian as of yet, it was a very sad day.

I'm not sure any other author has made such a great impression on young children.