![]() But they almost disarmed this country at a time it was obviously about to be destroyed, and I think I helped a little bit – not much, but some – in stating the fact that we were in a war and we damned well better ought to do something about it.”Īlthough Dr Seuss insisted he never started out with a moral in his children’s stories, he did say “there’s an inherent moral in any story” often he was able to use humour to mask what could be weighty topics. I believed the USA would go down the drain if we listened to the America Firstisms… I probably was intemperate in my attacks on them. “When I look at them now they’re hurriedly and embarrassingly badly drawn, and they’re full of many snap judgements that every political cartoonist has to make… The one thing I do like about them, however, is their honesty and their frantic fervor. Seuss followed up a 1976 interview for his former college, Dartmouth, with a handwritten note in which he partially apologised for the cartoons. And I know later in his life he was not proud of those at all.” “Characterizations were done, and he was a cartoonist and he tended to adopt those. ![]() “I think he would find it a legitimate criticism, because I remember talking to him about it at least once and him saying that things were done a certain way back then,” Ted Owens, a great-nephew of Geisel, told The New York Times. Historian Richard Minear’s Dr Seuss Goes to War features nearly 200 cartoons that were left unseen for half a century – cartoons that help redraw the beloved king of the kooky. ![]() “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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