Theodore Seuss Geisel was born March, 2 1904 in the almost hometown of Springfield, MA. Seuss was his middle name and he put Dr. in front of it because his father had always wanted him to be a doctor. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1925, and proceeded on to Oxford University with the intent of acquiring a doctorate in literature. At Oxford he met his future wife Helen Palmer who he wed in 1927. He returned from Europe in 1927, and began working for a magazine called Judge, the leading humor magazine in America at the time, submitting both cartoons and humorous articles for them. He was also submitting cartoons to Life, Vanity Fair and Liberty. In May of 1954, Life published a report concerning illiteracy among school children. The report said, among other things, that children were having trouble to read because their books were boring. This inspired Geisel's publisher, and prompted him to send Geisel a list of 400 words he felt were important, asked him to cut the list to 250 words (the publishers idea of how many words at one time a first grader could absorb), and write a book. Nine months later, Geisel, using 220 of the words given to him published The Cat in the Hat, which went on to instant success. In 1960 Bennett Cerf bet Geisel $50 that he couldn't write an entire book using only fifty words. The result was Green Eggs and Ham. Cerf never paid the $50. In some of his works, he made reference to an insecticide called Flit. These references gained notice, and led to a contract to draw comic ads for Flit. This association with the insecticide lasted 17 years and gained him national exposure as well as coining the catchphrase "Quick, Henry, the Flit!." Geisel's contract with Standard Oil precluded doing other commercial art for other companies but it didn't forbid doing children's books and so he wrote To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street using the famous name of Dr. Seuss, intending to keep his real n...