‘Becoming Dr. Seuss’ opens up the author-illustrator’s world
‘Becoming” is the right descriptor for Theodor Seuss Geisel. The grandson of a New England brewer, he started out as a clever self-taught cartoonist whose comic touch with image and words was first fully appreciated in advertisements for bug spray and motor oil. “‘I began to get it through my skull that words and pictures were yin and yang,’ he said later. ‘I began thinking that words and pictures, married, might possibly produce a progeny more interesting than either parent.’”
Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, he made his way after graduation from Dartmouth College to Oxford University, where he met Helen Palmer, the
