A FAITHFUL ELEPHANT
The Genius of ‘Horton Hatches The Egg’
One of the best Dr. Seuss books was ahead of its time in how it portrayed gender roles
Bennett Cerf, a founder of Random House, once said he had published great writers like William Faulkner but only one genius: Theodor Geisel, or Dr. Seuss. It’s easy to see what he meant.
Seuss never won a Nobel Prize, as Faulkner did. Nor did he receive a Caldecott Medal, though he won two Honor Book awards and a Pulitzer Prize, a special citation for “his contribution over nearly half a century to the education and enjoyment of America’s children and their parents.”
But Seuss may have done more than any author to instill a love of reading in American children in the second half of the 20th century.
No less remarkably, he did it by writing good books, not the sort of commercial dross that publishers tend to rationalize with, “At least it gets children reading.”
Some of the Seuss books have elements that have aged poorly. They include his first, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, published in 1937, which reflects racial and ethnic stereotypes common in its era. Seuss’ outdated words and pictures led his estate to make the controversial decision to remove that book…
