Dr. Seuss came up with the idea for The Grinch the day after Christmas when he looked in the mirror and saw a rather Grinch-ish look on his face. “Something had gone awfully wrong with Christmas or maybe with me,” he said. Weary of the over-commercialization of Christmas and sensing that the meaning of the holiday was being lost in the wrappings and ribbons, boxes and bows, Ted Geisel sat down and wrote How The Grinch Stole Christmas! when he was 53 years old.

In 1957, Random House named Ada Vine as Production Manager of the newly formed Beginner Books division, which Ted oversaw. The Cat in the Hat was their first project together, followed in 1960 by the blockbuster Green Eggs and Ham. Ada would work alongside Dr. Seuss for the next 20 years.

On the occasion of her retirement in 1977, Ted painted Love and Music as a seemingly self-satirizing homage to their many years spent together. Here we see Ted in a confluence of iconic characters from those two early projects with Ada, The Cat in the Hat and Sam-I-am’s famous antagonist from Green Eggs and Ham. Love and Music was presented to Ada Vine at her retirement party.

Ted Geisel had a unique ability to cut to the heart of the matter. He would spend as much as a year on a new book, tacking up written pages and pencil drawings across the corkboard walls of his studio. Slowly, over the course of many months, he would sift through his work in search of the simplest, most powerful ideas to propel his story forward.   

Ted’s dedication to such simplicity can be seen here in his concept drawing for this work. The lower right-hand corner reveals his “word count” to be certain he doesn’t exceed the 50-word challenge.

Life is a great balancing act between what we should do and what we want to do…. Between how far we get stuck in a jam and how long we take to find our way out…. Between turning left or right, forward or back.

We all face large and small dilemmas nearly every day. Life’s beauty is in the collective outcomes of such precarious situations, with each experience bringing us closer to knowing who we are and what we hope to become. As such, encountering “a large family of dilemmas” throughout our years seems the best path to a life well lived.

The Cat in the Hat presents perhaps one of the best examples of the conundrums Dr. Seuss leaves in the hands of six-year-olds to solve. At the end of the book, after the Cat in the Hat wrecks the home and returns to clean everything up, the mother finally appears and asks, “Did you have any fun? Tell me. What did you do?” Instead of answering the question, Dr. Seuss passes the conundrum from the characters in the book to the readers who are now challenged to answer the dilemma.

Ted Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) drew each page for every Dr. Seuss book he wrote. What many people don’t realize is that for each final-line drawing, he would create multiple concept drawings leading up to the final published image. The images would be tirelessly refined, along with the text for each page, with subtle adjustments made to characters and nuanced shifts to the writing.

In the work done for The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Ted did something rarely found in his early-stage concept drawings. Here he combines pen and ink with colored pencil, crayon, and a watercolor wash to create the background. The resulting image takes on a unique, painterly quality rarely found in the development phase of his other children’s books.

There's so so much to read! has been meticulously re-created from Dr. Seuss's 1978 beginner book, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut! By reintroducing his lovable and mischievous Cat in the Hat, now accompanied by an impressionable young Cat protégé, Theodor Seuss Geisel continued his lifelong legacy of promoting literacy with this book's thematic message that reading can be fun, funny, and education, all at the same time.

This may be one of the most deeply personal, and profoundly impactful of all the messages he conveyed in his lifetime. In order for it to not only summarize his own life, but to summarize ours and all who may read it in the future, Ted seemed to know that authenticity was paramount.

He tells us quite simply that nothing is 100% certain, life doesn’t work that way. There is always an element of the unknown. However, once we embrace that notion, anything is possible.

In the final image of his entire publishing career, he encourages us to believe in ourselves, trust the journey, embrace the unknown, and ultimately, get the most out of the life we are leading.