“Dr Seuss, beloved purveyor of genial rhyming nonsense for beginning readers, stuff about cats in hats and foxes in socks, started as a feisty political cartoonist who exhorted America to do battle with Hitler? Yeah, right!” exclaims Art Spiegelman, the graphic novelist who created Maus, in the foreword to a 1999 book. The surreal rhyming verse and strange creatures that populated his children’s books – whales with long eyelashes goats joined at the beard many-legged cows – find their roots in his World War Two propaganda cartoons. There was a time, however, when he combined the two – and many believe it was during this period that the essential elements of Dr Seuss emerged. His most famous, The Cat in the Hat (1957), reveals many of his signature flourishes: a delight in words for their own sake, creating ever more surreal combinations through surprising rhymes drawings of fantastical figures and complicated inventions and a questioning of the values and conventions of adults.Īrguing in a 1959 Life magazine interview that “kids can see a moral coming a mile off and they gag at it”, Seuss chose humour over dogmatism.

Seuss wrote and illustrated more than 60 books, which have sold over 600 million copies. Why The Yellow Submarine is a trippy cult classic

Yet there’s also a political edge to Dr Seuss that is often overlooked. It’s one that has entered popular consciousness, contributing to pop song lyrics and even being cited by a Supreme Court judge. More perhaps than any other children’s author, the musings of US writer and illustrator Theodor Seuss Geisel – who adopted the pen name Dr Seuss while at college – amount to a kind of philosophy.

There’s a healthy dollop of wisdom percolating through the slapstick silliness and anarchic absurdity of Dr Seuss. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.Īnd never mix up your right foot with your left.”

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