Dr. Seuss Birthday Facts

As you know I love my Dr. Seuss fun facts, I wrote a post several years ago which, due to the great positive responses I got, started my Fun Facts Friday posts. March 2 is the birthday of this wonderful author so I hastened to find some more fun facts about this fun guy.

A line in Horton Hears a Who! was used by pro-life (that’s anti-abortion for my international readers) as a slogan. The line was e “A person’s a person, no matter how small”. We don’t know if that was Seuss’ intention, however he did threaten to sue the group if the didn’t remove the slogan from their letterhead.

In the 40’s and 50’s there was a series of books which taught kids how to read, the books were published by Loganberry Books and were called the Dick and Jane primers. Dick and Jane lived in a nice, clean, sanitized suburbia and were very popular. Dr. Seuss however thought they were boring and wrote The Cat in the Hat.

A few months after the Watergate scandal a book called Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! was published. Many thought that the book was about disgraced President Richard Nixon, however it’s highly unlikely that Seuss thought of, written and gotten ready to print (editing, cover art, pictures, etc.), printed and distributed in such a short time.

Dr. Seuss did have his share of controversy. His book The Butter Battle Book was pulled from libraries because it referenced the arms race and the Cold War. The two societies in the books argue about which way is the right way to eat bread with butter (the Yooks like it butter side up, meanwhile the Zooks insist that butter side down is the only way to go) and start building weapons to outdo one another. At the end they both use their arsenal but the reader doesn’t know who won.

The Butter Battle Book was not Seuss’ first foray into politics, Yertle the Turtle actually represents of Hitler who works his turtles to the bone stacking themselves up so he could reach the moon. At then end one turtle burps and the whole stack falls freeing the turtles from their stacking duty. Believe it or not Seuss flat out said that Yertle represents Hitler, yet that wasn’t the controversy at the time. The dispute by Random House was that the book had a burp in it, up until that time no one has ever written a children’s book with a burp.

The first recorded use of the word nerd was in 1950’s If I Ran the Zoo.

The Lorax is undoubtedly an environmental tale. When the book came out the logging industry was so upset that they published The Truax which was a book from their point of view.

In 1925 a young Theodore Geisel was caught drinking alcohol. At the time the idiotic law known as Prohibition was in affect and Geisel forced to resign as editor-in-chief of the student magazine in Dartmouth. After that Geisel wrote onlynder nom-de-plumes including Theo LeSig, Rossetta Stone and, of course. Dr. Seuss.

Zohar – Man of la Book
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