Dark Facts We Learned About Dr. Seuss's Past That Made Us Cringe

Dr. Seuss, like many Americans during WWII, contributed to the war effort in his own way - by creating racist propaganda that attacked America’s Japanese enemies. Seuss was contracted by the government to produce educational cartoons for the troops, and for this he was given full artistic license.

Much of his material depicted the Japanese with horrifically offensive caricatures, and the messages they contained were similarly problematic. Seuss’s propaganda also targeted the Germans and other perceived enemies of the state, but he saved his most venomous vitriol for the Japanese, and was a fervent supporter of internment camps.

World War II wasn't the only occasion for which Dr. Seuss produced racist cartoons. In his very first children’s book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Seuss drew a racist caricature of a Chinese person and labeled him a “Chinaman.” He refused to change it until 1978.

His book, If I Ran the Zoo, features two men supposedly from Africa who wear grass skirts without shirts or shoes. Several of his editorial cartoons featured demeaning depictions of Black people, and those depictions were often used to make extremely racist arguments. 

On March 2, 2021 (Seuss's birthday), Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which carries on the author's legacy, announced it would stop publishing and licensing six of his books: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. The publisher renounced the books with the admission that they "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."

"Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families," the announcement said. 

Dr. Seuss's first wife was American children's book author Helen Palmer Geisel, with whom he co-founded a publishing company called Beginner Books. 

Throughout the course of their 40-year marriage, Helen struggled repeatedly with her health, and for more than a decade leading up to her death, she was partially paralyzed due to Guillain-Barré syndrome. At the time of her passing in 1967, she was stricken with cancer.

Rather than standing by his wife, Seuss began an affair with Audrey Stone Dimond. The affair left Helen despondent and ultimately contributed to her death.

Shortly after Helen learned of her husband's affair, the couple's longtime housekeeper found Helen's body with an empty prescription pill bottle nearby.

In Helen Geisel’s suicide note, she wrote to her husband: 

Dear Ted,

What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, "failure, failure, failure..."

I love you so much...

I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you...

My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed...

Sometimes think of the fun we had all through the years...

Seuss went on to marry his mistress less than a year after his wife’s passing.

The man behind The Cat in the Hat was born Theodor Seuss Geisel, but that’s not the name he would make famous. A pen name became a necessity when Geisel lost his job as editor-in-chief of Dartmouth humor mag Jack-O-Lantern after he and several friends were busted for drinking during Prohibition.

From then on, Geisel would write under the name of Seuss, and he’d add the Dr. part of his nom de plume after college as a consolation to his father for never becoming an actual doctor.

Dr. Seuss found the majority of his success in writing children’s books, but at one point in his career he thought his talents would be better suited to the art of erotic storytelling.

When Seuss joined with Random House Publishing in 1939, he did so under the condition that they allow him to publish an adult book that he had been working on for a while. The result was The Seven Lady Godivas. The book was a critical failure; out of the 10,000 copies that were initially printed, only 2,500 were sold. 

In an effort to make sense of the failure, Dr. Seuss claimed, “I attempted to draw the sexiest babes I could, but they came out looking absurd.”