Teachers and students across the country celebrated Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, on Friday. Every year on March 2, the author and illustrator is honored with a celebration of books and creativity known as "Read Across America Day."
Geisel would have turned 114 on Friday. The author of popular children's books such as Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who! and The Cat in the Hat, died in 1991 at the age of 87.
Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904 and attended both Dartmouth and Oxford as a young adult. He had aspirations of becoming a professor but dropped out of Oxford and decided to become a full-time cartoonist instead.
He adopted the name Dr. Seuss during his senior year of college at Dartmouth, after he was prohibited from contributing to the humor magazine for drinking gin in his dorm room, according to Biography.com. The first 20 or so years of Geisel's career were spent on cartooning and advertising. When World War II broke out, he took a job making animated training videos and propaganda posters.
The first book Geisel ever published, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected 27 times before a friend helped release the book with Vanguard Press in 1937. Geisel then worked on more than 40 titles.
Quotes from Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss:
"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living."
"Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You," he wrote in the book Happy Birthday to You!
"Kid, you'll move mountains," from Oh, The Places You'll Go!
"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not," he wrote in The Lorax.
"The more that you read. The more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go," is a quote from his book I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
"If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good," from One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.
"Remember me and smile, for it's better to forget than to remember me and cry."
Uncommon Knowledge
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