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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 Seuss’ outdated words and pictures led his estate to make the controversial decision to remove that book and five others from the market in 2021.
But most of his more than 60 books remain in print, translated into dozens of languages, and with good reason.
They typically have whimsical pictures and a brief text with strong rhymes as simple as: “One fish / two fish / red fish / blue fish.” Dr. Seuss taught generations of children to love poetry, some of it influenced by the nonsense words of Lewis Carroll in “The Jabberwocky.”
One of his least-appreciated virtues is that some of his books were as far ahead of their time as others were behind in their stereotypes.
A good example is Horton Hatches the Egg, a fanciful narrative poem about a gentle elephant who agrees to sit on the nest of a self-absorbed bird named Mayzie when…
