Judith Morgan

The adventures of ‘Mulberry Street’ did not flow easily from the quirky brain of Dr. Seuss. Repeatedly he questioned every word of every verse, rewriting tediously, draft after draft.

Among Ted’s first fan letters at ‘Judge’ was a curt note from a condemned murderer on death row in Huntsville, Texas, written on the eve of his electrocution. ‘If your stuff is the kind of thing they’re publishing nowadays,’ the prisoner took the time to write, ‘I don’t so much mind leaving.’ Ted was enraptured with the letter and kept it in his desk throughout his long life, always feigning fear of running into the felon, whose sentence had been commuted at the last minute.

The ‘Lorax’ doesn’t say lumbering is immoral,’ Ted insisted. ‘I live in a house made of wood and write books printed on paper. It’s a book about going easy on what we’ve got. It’s antipollution and antigreed.’

Ted’s habits were rigid: he rose after nine, went to his desk by ten and stayed there throughout the day with only brief breaks. He worked seven days a week, secluded from the distraction of even radio or taped music.

Years after his abortive attempt to earn a postgraduate degree at Oxford, the ‘Dr.’ in Ted’s pseudonym became legitimate. But he remained characteristically unawed. He laughed at himself as ‘Dr. Dr. Seuss,’ and appeared on the Dartmouth platform in a cap and gown that he bought secondhand in a backstreet shop in San Diego.

The only message his books had in common, he had said, was hope, and this was the theme of ‘Oh, the Places You’ll Go!’ With almost primordial simplicity, he wrote in the voice of a wise uncle about human frailty, fear, and failure.

At the age of eighty-five, Ted still sat in his studio from 10:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. He told his nephew, ‘You have to put in your hours, and finally you make it work.’

It was signed ‘Seuss,’ but within weeks Ted added ‘Dr.’ and used this pseudonym thereafter, explaining that the honorific compensated for the doctorate he never won at Oxford. (‘I was saving the name of Geisel,’ he explained, ‘for the Great American Novel.’