My Reading Test

Theodor Seuss Geisel was born on March 2, 1904. He entered Dartmouth College in 1921 and became the editor in chief for the school’s humor magazine “Dartmouth Jack O’Latern”. One night he was caught drinking gin with some friends, against the Prohibition laws, and was forced to resign his position. However Geisel circumvented the barring by submitting articles and stories under a pen name until he went to Oxford University, where he got a degree in literature. During the Great Depression, Geisel drew and wrote advertisements for many companies, including Standard Oil and Flit—an insecticide.

At the advent of WWII, Geisel turned to drawing political cartoons. Later in the war, Giesel was hired by the army to make propaganda films, training films and documentaries. Not only would he go on to earn a Legion of Merit, but also won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

After the war, Geisel continued to write from his home in California. Though experiencing moderate success, he never won the coveted Newbery Medal. In 1954, LIFE magazine published a report about rising illiteracy among school children. Apparently the books children were meant to read were too boring. Outraged, a text book editor sent the childless Giesel a list of 400 words children should know and asked Giesel to cut the list down to 250 and write a book using only those words. Giesel was mostly successful--as he utilized 236 of them. The book was published and became a best seller.

And to this day the book is burned into the public's conscious as “The Cat in the Hat.”