Dr. Seuss's infectious rhymes, his blue-tufted, strong-willed creatures, and his knack for pithy, roundabout plots have been entertaining children and adults for decades. And as the biographer shows, the seemingly haphazard trajectory of Theodor Geisel's life bears a close resemblance to the zigzag plot lines of his children's books, by turns a cartoonist, ad agency artist (for Flit bug killer), author, caricaturist, documentary-film writer and producer, political cartoonist, and editor. He follows Geisel's life from his childhood in Massachusetts, to his sacking from the editorship of Dartmouth's humor magazine, to the publication of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (after 17 rejections), which finally launched him on the career for which he is best known. Given unprecedented access to Dartmouth's extensive Geisel holdings, the author captures Geisel's life in full as he offers fresh insights into the sources of Geisel's creativity, from his surreal images to his anti-authoritarian stance and slapstick humor. The book features many of Dr. Seuss's lesser known illustrations, including college drawings, insecticide ads, and wartime political cartoons, all of which offer a glimpse of his early artistic style and the visual origins of the more famous creatures that later populated his children's books.-- From publisher description and book jacket.