Dr Suess
Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as the beloved Dr. Seuss, was born in 1904 on Howard Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. Ted’s father, Theodor Robert, and grandfather were brewmasters in the city. His mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, often soothed her children to sleep by “chanting” rhymes remembered from her youth. Ted credited his mother with both his ability and desire to create the rhymes for which he became so well known.
Although the Geisels enjoyed great financial success for many years, the onset of World War I and Prohibition presented both financial and social challenges for the German immigrants. Nonetheless, the family persevered and again prospered, providing Ted and his sister, Marnie, with happy childhoods.
The influence of Ted’s memories of Springfield can be seen throughout his work. Drawings of Horton the Elephant meandering along streams in the Jungle of Nool, for example, mirror the watercourses in Springfield’s Forest Park from the period. The fanciful truck driven by Sylvester McMonkey McBean in The Sneetches could well be the Knox tractor that young Ted saw on the streets of Springfield. In addition to its name, Ted’s first children’s book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, is filled with Springfield imagery, including a look-alike of Mayor Fordis Parker on the reviewing stand, and police officers riding red motorcycles, the traditional color of Springfield’s famed Indian Motocycles.
Ted left Springfield as a teenager to attend Dartmouth College, where he became editor-in-chief of the Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth’s humor magazine. Although his tenure as editor ended prematurely when Ted and his friends were caught throwing a drinking party, which was against the prohibition laws and school policy, he continued to contribute to the magazine, signing his work “Seuss.” This is the first record of the “Seuss” pseudonym, which was both Ted’s middle name and his mother’s maiden name.
To please his father, who wanted him to be a college professor, Ted went on to Oxford University in England after graduation. However, his academic studies bored him, and he decided to tour Europe instead. Oxford did provide him the opportunity to meet a classmate, Helen Palmer, who not only became his first wife, but also a children’s author and book editor.
After returning to the United States, Ted began to pursue a career as a cartoonist. The Saturday Evening Post and other publications published some of his early pieces, but the bulk of Ted’s activity during his early career was devoted to creating advertising campaigns for Standard Oil, which he did for more than 15 years.
As World War II approached, Ted’s focus shifted, and he began contributing weekly political cartoons to PM magazine, a liberal publication. Too old for the draft, but wanting to contribute to the war effort, Ted served with Frank Capra’s Signal Corps (U.S. Army) making training movies. It was here that he was introduced to the art of animation and developed a series of animated training films featuring a trainee called Private Snafu.
While Ted was continuing to contribute to Life, Vanity Fair, Judge and other magazines, Viking Press offered him a contract to illustrate a collection of children’s sayings called Boners. Although the book was not a commercial success, the illustrations received great reviews, providing Ted with his first “big break” into children’s literature. Getting the first book that he both wrote and illustrated, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, published, however, required a great degree of persistence – it was rejected 27 times before being published by Vanguard Press.
The Cat in the Hat, perhaps the defining book of Ted’s career, developed as part of a unique joint venture between Houghton Mifflin (Vanguard Press) and Random House. Houghton Mifflin asked Ted to write and illustrate a children’s primer using only 225 “new-reader” vocabulary words. Because he was under contract to Random House, Random House obtained the trade publication rights, and Houghton Mifflin kept the school rights. With the release of The Cat in the Hat, Ted became the definitive children’s book author and illustrator.
After Ted’s first wife died in 1967, Ted married an old friend, Audrey Stone Geisel, who not only influenced his later books, but now guards his legacy as the president of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.
At the time of his death on September 24, 1991, Ted had written and illustrated 44 children’s books, including such all-time favorites as Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, Fox in Socks, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His books had been translated into more than 15 languages. Over 200 million copies had found their way into homes and hearts around the world.
Besides the books, his works have provided the source for eleven children’s television specials, a Broadway musical and a feature-length motion picture. Other major motion pictures are on the way.
His honors included two Academy awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award and the Pulitzer Prize.
He was stillborn — no heartbeat, declared dead by the family doctor, and put aside for later burial. Another doctor in the delivery room had an idea, and immersed the newborn in ice-cold water. The shock caused his heart to start beating, and the baby was soon crying and healthy, and named for Dr. Gordon, who had saved his life. In the more than ninety years of his life, Gordon Parks became internationally renowned as a photographer, filmmaker, poet, novelist, and composer.
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. During his lifetime, and for half a century afterwards, his work was largely disregarded or even derided as the work of a madman. Today Blake’s work is considered seminal in the history of both poetry and the visual arts of the Romantic Age. Blake’s prophetic poetry is often considered to be the writings of extraordinary originality and genius. Though he is now considered to have been a spiritual visionary of the Romantic age, his work has been said to form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language”. His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him “far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced”. Born inside London, Blake spent the entire course of his life, save for three years, inside the city.His creative vision, however, engendered a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced ‘imagination’ as “the body of God”,or “Human existence itself”.
George Segal was born in New York on November 26, 1924 to a Jewish couple who emigrated from Eastern Europe. His parents first settled in the Bronx where they ran a butcher shop. They later moved to a New Jersey poultry farm. George spent many of his early years working on the poultry farm , helping his family through difficult times. For a while George lived with his aunt in Brooklyn so that he could attend Stuyvesant Technical High School and prepare himself for a future in the math/science field. It was here that George first discovered his love for art. During World War II he had to curtail his studies in order to help on the family poultry farm. He later attended Pratt, Cooper Union and finally New York University where he furthered his art education and received a teaching degree in 1949. It was during these years that Segal met other young artists eager to make statements based on the real world rather than the pure abstractionism that was all the rage. He joined the 10th St scene, painting and concentrating on expressionist, figurative themes.
Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor’s degree.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on November 24, 1864, in southern France. Son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse, he was the last in the line of an aristocratic family that dated back a thousand years. Today, the family estate houses the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec. As a child, Henri was weak and often sick. But by the time he was ten years old he had begun to draw and paint.
Steven Holl (born December 9, 1947, Bremerton, Washington) is an American academic architect and watercolorist best known for the 1998 Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland and the controversial 2003 Simmons Hall at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.. In June 2007 the much celebrated Bloch Building addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri opened to the public.
Kenneth Noland, along with Morris Louis, transmitted the energy, excitement, and inventiveness of the New York art scene to artists in Washington, D.C. Born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1924, Noland served in the Army from 1942 to 1945. From 1946 to 1948 he studied at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, working with Ilya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers, well-known artists who were on the faculty there. In 1948 he traveled to Paris, where he had his first one-person show. Returning to America in 1949, Noland moved to Washington, D.C. and worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art (1949–1950); later he taught at The Catholic University of America (1951–1960). Noland frequently returned to Black Mountain College, where in the summer of 1950 he met artist Helen Frankenthaler and Clement Greenberg, the noted critic, who became a champion of his art. Through them he became aware of Abstract Expressionism. This encounter was critical in the development of Noland’s artistic style; as he began experimenting with Frankenthaler’s pouring and staining techniques, which became the impetus for his own color field paintings, abstract canvases saturated with pure color.
René Magritte was born on the 21st November, 1898 in Hainaut, Belgium. His father was a tailor and a merchant. As his business did not go well the family had to move often. René lost his mother early and tragically – she committed suicide for unclear reasons. René was only 14 years old at the time.
