I don’t know if you all knew this about me, but one of my favorite movies is Horton Hears a Who. Now, if you have not seen it yet, go find it and watch it. I will wait…
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Glad you are back. What did you think? Amazing?! ”ASAP. Whatever that means. Probably act swiftly awesome pachyderm.” Well, I was watching the movie again for the 17x last night, and no, this post will have nothing even closely related to science involved in it, and it started me thinking about who is this Dr. Suess character? I, of course, started at Wikipedia.
Dr. Suess was born the pen name for Theodor Suess Geisel. He was born in 1904 and died of throat cancer in 1991. He had a long career publishing over 60 books, mostly children’s books. In fact, some of his books are on the list of best-selling children’s book of all time: Green Eggs and Ham at #4, The Cat in the Hat at #9, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish at #13. Interestingly, he started off writing/drawing political and satirical works for many famous magazines and newspapers including, Judge, Life, Vanity Fair, Liberty, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald. During WWII, he published many political cartoons denouncing Hitler and Mussolini and even worked drawing pictures and making propaganda films for the War Production Board.
It wasn’t until his later years that he moved from Springfield, Massachusetts, to La Jolla, California to begin writing children’s books. One interesting story about one of the books is that in 1954 Life published a report on the increased rate of illiteracy among school children. The director of the education division complied a list of 348 words he felt were important for 1st graders to recognize and challenged Dr. Suess to create a book with 250 of them. Nine months later, Dr. Suess returned with The Cat in the Hat. He had used 236 of the words.
Another interesting fact about the book my favorite movie is on is that many people believe the line, “A person’s a person no matter how small,” is a node to pro-life. In fact, Dr. Suess never started his books with any sort of moral lesson. He preferred to let his books speak for themselves. He demanded that the pro-life group retract the use of this phrase and they did. Actually, Horton was written as an allegory for the Hiroshima bombing and the American post-war occupation of Japan.
So that is all I have for you about the amazing Dr. Suess. I do recommend you check out Horton Hears a Who. I will leave you with this last Dr. Suess quote, “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” Now, that somewhat applies to science.
My favorite Dr. Suess book!
