How the Grinch Stole Christmas! was also an immediate hit and has since sold 7.5-million copies, according to Forbes. The book was a smash, Thing One and Two became such household names that the print run for Geisel’s follow-up was upped to a healthy 50,000 copies for the holidays. Its combination of bright drawings, wordplay hijinks and sense of mischief would kill off the boring drab Dick and Jane books for good, of which Geisel was extremely proud. The Cat in the Hat didn’t just upend a brother and sister’s rainy day afternoon, it changed the face of children’s reading habits. Thanks to these two humongous books, Geisel truly became Dr. “ The Cat in the Hat comes out in March and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in early December. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination. “For his career, 1957 is the game-changer because he caught iconic lightning in a bottle, twice,” says Brian Jay Jones, author of Becoming Dr. Seuss, American kiddie culture-definer, but it all changed when he accomplished the literary feat of basically winning the World Series and Super Bowl M.V.P. By the early months of 1957, the 53-year-old was still more Ted Geisel, advertising illustrator, than Dr. He’d had a modicum of success with 13 titles dating back to 1937, when his first published book, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, hit shelves. (A scam to be sure, but the Grinch is right about the broiling damage that can be done without proper UV skin care.)Īt the time, the Grinch wasn’t making the local “Who’s Who in Whoville?” ledger and his creator, Theodor Geisel, wasn’t making a living writing children’s books. It’s “worth a lot more than that old-fashioned sun,” says the Grinch. Seuss introduces the Grinch as a con artist selling a piece of string for 98 cents to a yellow-furred galoot out catching some rays. In 1955, a 33-line illustrated poem “The Hoobub and the Grinch” ran in Redbook magazine. He didn't even debut amidst the Jing-Tinglers of the season, but rather during the dog days of summer. He wasn’t on television, on stage, or even in a book. The first time readers young and old laid their eyes on the Grinch, he wasn’t green.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |