Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel
A Biography
Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel. We all know Dr. Seuss. But few of us know Mr. Geisel. I got this book as a gift from my friend (Zac Zeitlin) after our families enjoyed a hike together during which we chatted about my love of Mister Rogers and the documentary featuring him: Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Our conversation turned to another one of the most iconoclastic and influential luminaries of the 20th century: Dr. Seuss. Zac told me that this biography was one of his all-time favorites. After reading it, I can see why. It’s a remarkably endearing biography by Judith and Neil Morgan who knew Ted Geisel in the latter half of his life. Big Ideas we explore include the fact that Ted was voted LEAST likely to succeed (and then became the MOST successful of his Dartmouth class :), how to move through walls of rejection, the cat jumping out of the hat (an origin story), money (and joy), and Ted's admonition that we CAN and we've GOT TO do better than this.
Big Ideas
- Least Likely to SucceedOh, the places you won’t go!
- Going for ItAll in.
- Hitting a Wall of RejectionAnd nearly burning the manuscript.
- The CatJumping out of the hat.
- MoneyAnd joy.
- We Can... We’ve Got To...Do better than this.
“The origin of Ted’s exuberant creativity fascinated journalists, who seldom failed to ask where he got his ideas. Never wanting to disappoint, Ted would reply earnestly and graciously that it happened on his annual visit to Über Gletch, ‘a small town in the Austrian Alps,’ where he went each year to get his cuckoo clock repaired. Another La Jolla friend spoke about this, saying that during long interviews with Ted in the final year of his life he had pressed Ted to talk about creativity. Drawing was usually easy for him, Ted said, and writing always hard. ‘I stay with a line until the meter is right, and the rhyme is right, even if it takes five hours. Sometimes, I go counter to the clock.’ He fell silent for a long moment. ‘Hmmm . . . I don’t understand what I just said, do you? ‘Well, then. That’s it! That’s the creative process!
His was a mind, his first wife, Helen, had said, that never grew up. For Ted it was not a calculated act to reach the heart of a child’s imagination because he was amusing himself at the same time. At the core of his spirit was a child’s sense of fun and curiosity. He took it to Dartmouth College, to Oxford and through the Great Depression as he struggled to learn who he might become, and it sustained him through those last days in 1991 when he looked up into Audrey’s anxious face, smiled and asked, ‘Am I dead yet?’”
~ Judith Morgan and Neil Morgan from Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel
Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel.
We all know Dr. Seuss. But few of us know Mr. Geisel.
I got this book as a gift from my friend (Zac Zeitlin) after our families enjoyed a hike together during which we chatted about my love of Mister Rogers and the documentary featuring him: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Our conversation turned to another one of the most iconoclastic and influential luminaries of the 20th century: Dr. Seuss. Zac told me that this biography was one of his all-time favorites. After reading it, I can see why.
It’s a remarkably endearing biography by Judith and Neil Morgan (get a copy here) who knew Ted Geisel in the latter half of his life. “They merge their firsthand insights with scholarly research, drawing material from hundreds of letters and interviews, as well as from their subject’s notes for an unpublished autobiography. They had full access to Geisel’s voluminous papers, illuminating his relationship with both of his wives and providing instructive glimpses of his creative process. The result is a frank and felicitous biography as unique as its subject.”
The book is packed with a bunch of inspiring stories and Big Ideas.
I’m excited to share a few of my favorites so let’s jump straight in!
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Get the BookLeast Likely to Succeed
“In a traditional final meeting Casque and Gauntlet members voted their predictions for one another. As chairman, Blodgett counted ballots and recalled that the vote on Ted was unanimous as ‘least likely to succeed.’ Blodgett said, ‘He never seemed serious about anything . . . and he turned out to be the greatest success of the whole delegation.’
On a Saturday night in April 1925 Ted’s reign as a big man on campus crashed. He and nine friends were sharing a pint of bootleg gin in his room at the Randall Club. President Hopkins, it was said, had made a pact with the upriver bootlegger who claimed Hanover as his territory: Hopkins would not interfere as long as the bootlegger didn’t send down bad booze. But the level of merriment that night in Ted’s room offended ‘Pa’ Randall, the proprietor. When Ted and Curtis Abel squirted seltzer water on the tin roof, Randall imagined the direst indignity and telephoned the police chief, who raided the party. In a hearing, Dean Craven Laycock placed Ted and his friends on probation ‘for defying the laws of Prohibition, and especially on the night before Easter.’ All were commanded to write letters to their parents relating their shame. Ted’s probation terms were especially odious to him; although his name remained on the masthead, he was forbidden to continue serving as editor of Jacko. But the Jacko office was not off-limits and for the final issues Ted sought anonymity through pseudonyms. His telltale cartoons were signed with various names, including L. Burbank and Thomas Mott Osborne, the warden of Sing Song Prison. Finally Ted turned to his own middle name and for the first time signed his cartoons as Seuss.”
How awesome (and funny!) is THAT?
The man who wrote the all-time best-selling college graduation gift was voted LEAST LIKELY TO SUCCEED by his classmates.
Oops. Here’s a great graduation gift, Ted. It’s a book called “Oh, the Places You Won’t Go!”
Only, of course, the joke was on them. Ted became one of the most celebrated graduates in Dartmouth’s history and, BY FAR, the largest donor.
Ted never had kids. Apparently, he once said “You have ‘em; I’ll entertain ‘em.” So, Dartmouth became the primary beneficiary of his estate (estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars). The Dartmouth School of Medicine? It’s named the “Geisel School of Medicine.”
Perhaps the best part of Ted Geisel’s graduation from Dartmouth was this: All his friends had plans for their future. A couple guys were going to Harvard Law School. Many were going on to graduate school or off to corporate jobs with their families.
Ted’s dad asked him what he planned to do. Ted told him he was going to Oxford on a fellowship. His dad was thrilled. The local newspaper published the exciting news the next day.
Only… He hadn’t actually *received* the fellowship yet. He’d only *applied* for it. Oops.
And all of that leads us to the first time Mr. Geisel published a cartoon under his middle name “Seuss.” Was that Plan A? Perhaps Plan B? Or maybe Plan C?
How about “Plan N” as in “Plan NEVER.” (Hah.)
He didn’t quite script the series of events that led to him getting banned from his beloved school paper. He stumbled upon the pseudonym that would earn him global fame among many generations. What a FANTASTIC (!) lesson for us all.
Oh, the Places You’ll Go when you embrace the inevitable and unforeseeable ups and downs of this one precious life of ours.
As they say, in a few years you’ll probably be laughing about whatever’s stressing you out these days. So, why wait? Let’s laugh together NOW.
Going for it
“Ted set up his drawing board and typewriter at his father’s desk and began bombarding New York editors with humor pieces and cartoons, most of them inhabited by misshapen but strangely appealing animals and birds. He sent samples to Dartmouth classmates who were already established in New York, asking if they knew any editor who might look at his work. At Oxford Helen had nudged him away from academia toward a creative career, and now she was doing everything she could to keep his confidence high. She wrote often. Ted’s animals, Helen told anyone who would listen, were ‘the sort you’d like to take home to meet the family.’”
Ted wound up finding a way to get into Oxford where he met his future wife (Helen) before dropping out to pursue a creative career.
He went to New York where, he wrote a friend, “I have tramped all over this bloody town and been tossed out of Boni and Liveright, Harcourt Brace, Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn, three advertising agencies, Life, Judge, and three public conveniences.”
He sold nothing and returned to his family’s home in Springfield. Guess what he did? He kept at it. Then he got a check for $25. -> “Based on this sale and his unwavering belief in timing and luck, Ted packed his battered old European bags, bade his parents farewell” and headed to New York to make it big.
That reminds me of a couple people. First, another guy who got his heart broken in New York. Before he added the “Mister,” Fred Rogers had a dream to make it as a songwriter. In The World According to Mister Rogers he tells us that when he was in college he went to New York to hang out with a songwriter he admired. He figured he’d share a few songs and get connected to the right people and his career would take off.
Um. Right. Fred tells us: “After I played him my songs, he said, ‘You have very nice songs. Come back when you have a barrelful.’ A barrelful of songs! That would mean hundreds of songs. I can still remember the disappointment I felt as I traveled all the way back to college. Nevertheless, that man’s counsel was more inspired than I realized. It took me years to understand that. But, of course, what he knew was that if I really wanted to be a songwriter, I’d have to write songs, not just think about the five I had written. And so, after the initial disappointment, I got to work; and through the years, one by one, I have written a barrelful.
In fact, the barrel’s overflowing now, and I can tell you, the more I wrote, the better the songs became, and the more those songs expressed what was real within me.”
I’m also reminded of Robert Frost. Did you know that Frost also (briefly) attended Dartmouth? Yep. Coincidentally, he received an honorary doctorate in the same ceremony as Ted in the 50’s.
And… He’s actually a case study in Stephen Cope’s brilliant book The Great Work of Your Life where he tells us: “Frost’s genius—like Thoreau’s, like Goodall’s, like Whitman’s—was at least in part his willingness to create the right conditions for his dharma to issue forth. His dharma required a farm—and so he bought one. His dharma required him to give up teaching—and so he relinquished it. His dharma required a period of intense work in England—and so he went. Like Frost’s our job is to make choices that create the right conditions for dharma to flourish. The Gift is indestructible. It is a seed. We are not required to be God. We are not required to create the seed. Only to plant it wisely and well.”
All that to say… Frost and Dr. Seuss lived this wisdom:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Are you?
Hitting a wall of rejection
“Ted printed the words in pencil on yellow sheets and asked Helen to read and discuss each page. It was six months before he was satisfied, and he began making the rounds in Manhattan, showing the book to publishers under the title A Story That No One Can Beat. He hit a wall of rejection. His humorous essays and cartoons found ready markets, but his reputation did not influence book editors. Their rebuffs were even more painful than those after his return from Oxford when he had stormed magazine offices with drawings. After being turned down a dozen times, Ted became gloomy, convinced that his style could never be adapted to books.
Twenty-seven publishing houses rejected A Story That No One Can Beat during the winter of 1936-37. The most frequent explanation was that it was 'too different' from other children’s books. Composition in verse was not in vogue, editors said, and fantasy wasn’t salable. …
On the blustery day he learned of his twenty-seventh rejection, Ted fought back frustration and anger and decided to return to his apartment, stage a ceremonial burning of the now tattered manuscript, and get back to cartooning for adults. As he walked grimly along Madison Avenue, he was hailed by Mike McClintock, who had been a year behind him at Dartmouth.
‘What’s that under your arm?’ McClintock asked. ‘That’s a book that no one will publish. I’m lugging it home to burn.’
McClintock smiled. Three hours earlier he had become juvenile editor of Vanguard Press. ‘We’re standing outside my new office,’ he said. ‘Come on up and let’s look at it.’”
Dr. Seuss’s origin story is the stuff of legends. Our beloved Dr. Seuss was rejected TWENTY-SEVEN TIMES before he found a publisher for his first children’s book?
<- WHAT? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?!
He was LITERALLY on his way home to BURN the manuscript when he (synchronistically) ran into a fellow Dartmouth alum who LITERALLY just got a job publishing children’s books.
Couple things. First, who in the world keeps on going after THAT many failed attempts?! I mean, even JK Rowling only had to endure TWELVE failures! (btw: Here’s the original synopsis Rowling typed out to pitch the first Harry Potter book. It’s astonishing.)
Second, how in the world did he happen to run into the *perfect* guy to buy his book?! Makes me think of Joseph Campbell and his wisdom on hidden hands helping the hapless hero.
In The Power of Myth, Campbell is asked by Bill Moyers: “Do you ever have this sense when you are following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands?”
Campbell says: “All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time—namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
Seems like Ted somehow got Campbell’s memo decades before he wrote it, eh? (Sounds like Magic JK Rowling would appreciate!)
The cat jumping out of the hat
“‘I read [the list] forty times and got more and more discouraged. It was like trying to make a strudel without any strudels. I was desperate, so I decided to read it once more. The first two words that rhymed would be the title of my book and I’d go from there. I found ‘cat’ and then I found ‘hat.’ That’s genius you see!’”
Once upon a time, Ted was challenged by a guy named William Spaulding to write a book with only 225 words. He agreed to take the “word list home and ‘play with it.’”
It was torture. But out of those constraints jumped our beloved Cat in the Hat.
(btw, I’ve read that book to the kids a bunch of times over the last few days—with a MUCH deeper appreciation of the brilliant effort that went into its creation.)
We tend to think that the works of our beloved creative geniuses just pop out of their heads fully formed and that their lives were just one happily-ever-after fantasy.
Of course, that’s simply (never) true. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate reading biographies so much. We get to peek behind the curtain of greatness and witness the common humanity of our most celebrated heroes.
For example: Did you know that it took a year of Dr. Seuss “getting mad as blazes and throwing [the manuscript] across the room” before he shipped The Cat in the Hat? And, did you know that he chain-smoked Camels? (Which led to cancer in his mouth?) And suffered from stage fright his entire life? And that his first wife killed herself? :/ (And then he married his best friend’s wife the next year?)
It’s (tragically) true. We’re all human. And, alas, as Maslow reminds us (and we remind ourselves so often and biographies help us to remember), THERE ARE NO PERFECT HUMANS.
Great people? Yes. Movers and shakers and iconoclastic geniuses? Yes.
Perfect people? Not one.
P.S. Another thing I was struck by as I read this book: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s point in Creativity: “Are there then no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity.”
Money
“At eighty, Ted forced himself to ponder his financial affairs, never his favorite use of time. It had been decades since he had written checks or kept financial records, and he seldom carried a wallet. … Beyond the role of money as a reassurance of the worth of his work, Ted was remarkably oblivious to his wealth and abnormally uninterested in material goods.”
Wikipedia says that Ted Geisel is one of the Top 10 bestselling author of all-time. (Technically he’s tied for #9 with JK Rowling and her 500 (!) million copies sold.)
(For curious souls: Shakespeare’s in the #1 slot with an astonishing 2 to 4 BILLION copies sold.)
When I read that passage I immediately thought of Stephen King and his wisdom in On Writing. (Fun fact: As it turns out, King clocks in at #22 on the all-time list with 350 million copies sold.)
He was once asked, “Do you do it for the money?” To which he replied: “The answer is no. Don’t now and never did. Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it. I have done some work as favors for friends—logrolling is the slang term for it—but at the very worst, you’d have to call that a crude kind of barter. I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side—I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for the joy, you can do it forever.”
P.S. As he approached 50, Ted asked his agent if she thought he could make $5,000/year as a children’s author. (That’s $50,000 in today’s money—what Ted would have been happy making.) He was still doing a bunch of different things but wanted to go all in on the kid’s books but was only making a few hundred dollars a year in royalties on his books at that stage. His agent said it was possible. Another guy who was there asked him why he’d want to do that when he could make five times that in the film industry (where he was already connected to three Academy Awards). He said he had no desire to keep doing that. Fast-forward a few years. The Cat in the Hat sells a million copies. The rest is history. Bliss + Grunt for the win.
P.S. Paulo Coelho is tied for #22 with Stephen King. They’ve both sold around 350 million copies of their books. Recall that his first book did so poorly that the publisher stopped printing it and gave him the rights back. Oh, the Places We Can Go If We Just Keep Going!
We can . . . and we’ve got to . . . do better than this
“In late summer his biographers asked if, after all the messages in his books, something remained unsaid. He cocked his head and said, ‘Let me think about that.’ Days later he handed over a sheet of yellow copy paper on which he had written:
Any message or slogan? Whenever things go a bit sour in a job I’m doing, I always tell myself, ‘You can do better than this.’
The best slogan I can think of to leave with the kids of the U.S.A. would be: ‘We can . . . and we’ve got to . . . do better than this.’
Then he drew a line through three words, the kids of. After books with pleas against the arms race, prejudice, pollution, and greed, and after a lifelong war on illiteracy, he was talking to everyone.”
Those are among the last words of the book and among the last words Ted Geisel ever wrote.(btw: Did you know that Oh, the Places You’ll Go! was the very last book Ted wrote? Yep.)
How’s that for one of his final messages? We can and we’ve got to (!!) do better.
So… How can you be the change you want to see a little more Today?
About the authors
