THEODOR SEUSS GEISEL

A slim biography puts the good Doctor and his oeuvre on the couch for some gentle analysis.

In the preface, Pease (English, Comparative Literature, African-American Literature/Dartmouth Univ.) gives a brief overview of existing Seuss scholarship and locates his work within it as “a modest effort to explore” the “relationship between Dr. Seuss’s art and Geisel’s life.” The author—who was awarded the Ted and Helen Geisel Chair in the Humanities at Dartmouth, Geisel’s alma mater—proceeds in largely chronological fashion. He sketches Geisel’s childhood in Springfield, Mass., the child of two prominent German-immigrant families and scion of the Geisel brewery dynasty. The double whammy of World War I and Prohibition was a trauma, writes Pease, that Geisel spent the first part of his career working to exorcise. His anti-authoritarian streak was cultivated as editor of the Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth’s humor magazine, from which he was fired for drunken shenanigans. Pease consistently refers to his subject as “Ted,” “Geisel” or “Dr. Seuss” depending on the context, a device that works well in advancing his thesis: “Dr. Seuss was no longer reconstructing Ted’s boyhood experience; in [The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins and The King’s Stilts] he was teaching moral lessons. Geisel’s democratic impulses and his liberal humanitarianism are evident in both works.” Drawing on Geisel’s writings and speeches as well as secondary sources both contemporary and retrospective, Pease drives his narrative forward, occasionally indulging in lit-crit gobbledygook (If I Ran the Zoo and If I Ran the Circus “both introduce a hypothetical frame that suspends the provenance of the adult’s insistence on empirically verifiable reality”). For the most part, though, he argues his points cleanly, and his readings of his subject’s books will engage readers. In his sparkling exegesis of The Cat in the Hat, the author interprets the Cat “as the activity of reading personified.”

A solid addition to the literature about one of the 20th century’s most influential American writers.