Theodor Seuss Geisel, AKA, Dr.Seuss, was born on March 2, 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Geisel's first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected 27 times before it was finally published by Vanguard Press in 1937.

Later, at the start of World War II, Geisel began contributing weekly political cartoons to the liberal publication PM Magazine. In 1942, too old for the World War II draft, Geisel served with Frank Capra's Signal Corps, making animated training films and drawing propaganda posters for the Treasury Department and the War Production Board.

Following the war, Geisel and Helen purchased an old observation tower in La Jolla, California, where he would write for at least eight hours a day, taking breaks to tend his garden. He wrote and published several children's books in the coming years, including, "If I Ran the Zoo" and "Horton Hears a Who!"

A major turning point in Geisel's career came when, in response to a 1954 LIFE magazine article that criticized children's reading levels, Houghton Mifflin and Random House asked him to write a children's primer using 220 vocabulary words. The resulting book, The Cat in the Hat, was published in 1957 and was described by one critic as a "tour de force." The success of The Cat in the Hat cemented Geisel's place in children's literature.

Over the next several years, Geisel would write many more books, both in his new, simplified vocabulary style and using his older, more elaborate technique. His later credits include favorites such as Green Eggs and Ham and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In 1966, with the help of eminent cartoonist Chuck Jones, The Grinch was adapted into an animated film.

Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known as Dr. Seuss, died on September 24, 1991, at the age of 87, in La Jolla, California. Sixteen of his books are on Publishers Weekly's list of the "100 Top-Selling Hardcover Children's Books of All-Time."