50+ Exciting Dr Seuss Facts For Kids

Who Was Dr Seuss?

Theodor Suess Geisel was an immensely popular American writer, cartoonist, poet, illustrator, and filmmaker, born in Springfield, Massachusetts.
He was better known by his pen name, Dr Seuss. He is a renowned artist for having more than 60 books under his pen name.
His work includes many of the most popular children’s books of all time, selling over 600 million copies and being translated into more than 20 languages by the time of his death.
He completed his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College and his graduation from Lincoln College, Oxford.
He left Oxford in 1927 to commence his career as an illustrator and cartoonist for Vanity Fair and various other publications.
He even worked as an illustrator for advertising campaigns and as a political cartoonist for the new york newspaper PM.
He published his first children’s book And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street in 1937.

What Are Some Early Life And Career Dr Seuss’s Facts For Kids?

Geisel was born and brought up in Springfield, Massachusetts. They had their family, which got closed due to prohibition and so his father was sent to supervise Springfield’s public park system by the mayor.
The mulberry street from his first book And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street was near his childhood home on Fairfield Street.
While he was doing his graduating in 1925 from Dartmouth College, he joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and also Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern.
He was highly encouraged in his writing by professor of rhetoric W. Benfield Pressey, whom he considered his “big inspiration for writing” at Dartmouth.
After graduating from Dartmouth, he entered Lincoln College, Oxford to pursue a Ph.D. in English literature where he met his future wife Helen Palmer.
However, Geisel left oxford without completing his degree and returned to the United States where he started writing and sending submissions to magazines, publishers, and advertising agencies.
His first nationally appeared on July 6, 1927, and this 25$ sale motivated Geisel to move from Springfield to New York. Later, Geisel accepted a job as a writer and illustrator at the humor magazine, Judge. He then married Palmer.
The money that he started earning from his advertising work and publishing and writing made him wealthier than most of his successful classmates from Dartmouth.
The increased income helped Geisel and his wife lead a luxurious life with a higher social circle. They travelled to more than 30 countries.
During the commencement of world war II, Dr Seuss started working on political cartoons drawing over 400 in a duration of two years for the left-leaning New York daily newspaper.
After the war ended, Dr Seuss and his wife moved to the La Jolly community where he went back to writing children’s books and stories again.
He won numerous awards during his career in advertising and writing and he published most of his books through the random house in North America and Willian Collins internationally.
During and after World War II from 1939 – to 1945, Geisel served in a part of the U.S. Army that made informational films and surprisingly two films that he made during the war won Academy awards.

What Are Some Interesting Dr Seuss Facts For Kids?

Dr Seuss wrote a musical and fantasy film called The 500 Fingers of Dr T which was released in 1953.
The movie resulted to be a critical and financial failure which is why Geisel decided never to attempt another feature film.
During the 1950s, he also published a number of illustrated short stories, mostly in Redbook magazine. Some of these were later collected (in volumes such as The Sneetches and Other Stories) or reworked into independent books (If I Ran the Zoo). A number of these stories have never been reprinted since their original appearances.
Dr Seuss was a liberal democrat and a supporter of President Franklin D.Roosevelt and the new deal.
His early political cartoons depicted clear opposition to fascism and even urged action against it both before and after the United States entered world war II.
After the war was over, Geisel overcame his feelings of animosity and used his book Horton hears a Who! as an allegory for the American post-war occupation of Japan and dedicated this book to his Japanese friend.
Geisel converted a copy of one of his famous children’s books, Marvin K Mooney Will you please go now!’ into a polemic shortly before the end of the 1972–1974 watergate scandal.
Dr Seuss’s books express his views and thoughts on a remarkable variety of social and political issues: including environmentalism and anti-consumerism; anti-authoritarianism, racial inequality, anti-isolationism and internationalism.
One of the most interesting Dr Seuss facts for kids is that he wrote more than 60 books in his life-long career many of which have topped the bestseller list, selling over 600 million copies and have also been translated into more than 20 languages.
Geisel also wrote a pair of books for adults: The SevenLady Godivas (1939; reprinted 1987), a retelling of the Lady Godiva legend that included nude depictions; and You’re only old once (written in 1986 when Geisel was 82), which chronicles an old man’s journey through a clinic.
His last book was Oh! The Places you will go, which was published the year before his death and has now become a great gift for graduating students.
In the year 2000, Publishers weekly compiled a list of bestselling children’s books of all time, in which 16 out of 100 books were wholly written by Geisel.
After Geisel died of cancer at the age of 87 in 1991, his widow Audrey Geisel stepped up to take charge of licensing matters.
Since her death in 2018, licensing has been controlled by the nonprofit Dr Seuss Enterprises.
Audrey even approved a live-action feature-film version of How the Grinch stole Christmas and another Seuss-themed musical, a broadway musical called Seussical, both of which premiered in 2000.
Five television series have been adapted from Geisel’s work including Gerald McBoing-Boing and Green Eggs and Ham.