Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

You probably know him as Dr. Seuss, but his real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel and he was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 2, in 1904.

Today, schools around the country kick off National Reading Month on or around his birthday.

Recent controversy over Seuss’ depiction of unflattering stereotypes and mostly white, all male characters in some of his illustrations has drawn criticism, and rightly so. The drawings are hurtful and insensitive, but also, unfortunately, an accurate reflection of the world in which Geisel lived. Happily the criticism is more correctly a commentary on the times than on the man himself.

Geisel’s contributions to early childhood reading efforts are significant, including his nonsensical story rhyme, The Cat in the Hat, the result of a challenge from William Ellsworth Spaulding, a publisher who found that children weren’t learning to read because the books were “too boring.” Spaulding created a list of 348 words that first-graders should know and then challenged Geisel to write something that “children can’t put down.” Using just 236 of those 348 words, Geisel wrote The Cat in the Hat—and the rest, as they say, is literary history.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.