I am fairly certain that there are more of the latter group than the former. As you can recall, Seuss learned that children weren’t reading well from a magazine article… did this article alert him to a growing educational issue, or show him a mental image of what his “big break” should be? I’m afraid this question cannot be answered. Authors who write for the sake of writing usually always do it as a method of expressing their own creativity. In some of his works Dr. Seuss was flamingly creative (“There’s a Wocket in my Pocket”, “The Sleep Book”, etc… nearly all the ones that deal with biodiversity) via his artwork and interesting use of language… as creative as creative can be. In other books, however, Seuss’ work was… dull. “Bartholomew and the Oobleck”, for instance, does not have any redeeming artwork, the words are in prose rather than poetry, and the storyline is quite manufactured. “Hop on Pop” is obviously not a creative undertaking… phrases like “Hop. Pop. Hop on Pop.” aren’t the cleverest things you can come up with. The creativity that Seuss was usually full of was, in the end, childish creativity… few individuals have remained creatively intrigued by childish subjects all their lives (Jad Fair is an example of one of those rarities), but, although his professional “image” makes it seem otherwise, Seuss was not one of them. He had a wide range of adult ideas he wanted to get out too. For example, look at these two paintings of his – the first is untitled, and the second is “Cat Detective in the Wrong Part of Town”: Scenes of what I presume to be bondage (see the shackles on the cow’s arm and the small masked woman?) and downright trippiness aren’t exactly children’s fare. A true artist would attempt to publish whatever it was he wanted to, no...
