Lessons Learned from Popular Culture by Tim Delaney Tim Madigan

Author:Tim Delaney, Tim Madigan [Tim Delaney, Tim Madigan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Media Studies, Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781438461472
Google: Dc2MDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2016-06-28T05:17:22+00:00

Dr. Seuss on the Loose

Even though he died in 1991, in 2014 Theodor Seuss Geisel astonished the publishing world with a “new” collection of stories. Better known to the world as the beloved children’s book author known as Dr. Seuss, Geisel (1904–1991) was both a master of rhyme and a talented artist. His 2014 Horton and the Kuggerbug and More Lost Stories was not in fact a “new” book at all, but rather a collection of previously published but long forgotten works that had appeared originally in Redbook magazine in the 1950s. Geisel’s biographer Charles Cohen had discovered these pieces, dealing with some of Dr. Seuss’s most famous characters and places—Horton the Elephant, the Christmas-hating Grinch, and Mulberry Street, as well as newly discovered characters such as the Kuggerbug, a mean little creature who loves to tap dance on Horton’s nose. “The stories,” Philip Sherwell writes, “feature his distinctive free-flowing rhyme in its anapaestic tetrameter. ‘He climbed and he climbed and he clum and he clum,’ he writes of one character, displaying his playful use of tenses and language” (Sherwell 2014).

A gifted cartoonist as well, Seuss’s poetic skills were legendary—he had the ability to use simple rhymes that nonetheless stayed permanently in one’s head. Millions of people have had the experience of reading one of his classic works, such as The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who, or Green Eggs and Ham when they were children and still remember them by heart decades later. And most parents have had the pleasure of reading these stories again, this time to their own children (and grandchildren).

As Amy Graff points out, “Seuss has been delighting children with his extraordinary imagination, made-up words, zany characters and silly rhymes ever since publishing And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1937. The release of this book was a miracle of sorts as the manuscript was rejected by 27 publishers” (Graff 2014). Just when he was about to give up, a former college classmate who had gotten a job as a children’s book editor saved the day. And the rest is history.

While he eventually wrote almost fifty books for children, many people do not know that this was not Theodor Geisel’s original vocation. He began his career as a commercial illustrator (creating such memorable ads as “Quick Henry, the Flit!” for a brand of insect repellant, which became a national catchword) and a political cartoonist. During the Depression era he created many political cartoons for the liberal New York newspaper PM, most of which attempted—in as humorous a way as possible, given the subject matter—to alert Americans to the growing danger of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, and encourage them to begin preparing for eventual war against the fascist powers. This advocacy of preparedness went against the Isolationism that predominated in America at the time. Having only recently experienced the horrors of World War I, most Americans were in no mood to contemplate going to war again, and many—including such stalwart figures

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