Our Dr. Seuss Quiz Will Grow Your Brain Three Sizes Today!

Seuss often claimed in interviews that a common theme in all his books was hope, and nowhere is this more evident than in Oh, the Places You'll Go! All you need for an exciting life is to be “as brainy and footsy as you,” Seuss writes.

Ron Howard brought Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to the big screen in 2000, with Jim Carrey starring as the green, grumpy, holiday-hating villain. The Cat in the Hat came out in 2003,  Horton Hears a Who! hit theaters in 2008 and  The Lorax became a 2012 animated musical fantasy-comedy film. But there’s good news for fans of  Oh, the Places You'll Go! A feature film is finally in the works. It’ll be produced by J.J. Abrams and is slated for a 2027 release.

He added the “Dr.” to his name because his father had wanted him to pursue a career in medicine. Geisel once quipped that he was saving his real name for when he finally got around to writing his “great American novel.”

The popular children’s book author had no biological children of his own, but gained two step-daughters when he married his second wife, Audrey Dimond.

Inspired by the success of  The Cat in the Hat, which used just under 250 words, Seuss' publisher, Bennett Cerf, challenged the author to trim his vocabulary even further. If he could write a children's book using just 50 unique words, Cerf would pay him $50. Seuss pulled it off with  Green Eggs and Ham, and just one of the 50 words was longer than five letters.  The Washington Post called it "the greatest low-wage gamble in American publishing history."

Although the Cat uses all of those props at some point during the book, he enters the house with an umbrella. And no wonder, given that the story begins on a “cold, cold, wet day.”

It’s debatable whether Seuss actually came up with the word, but most sources agree that “nerd” first appeared in print in  If I Ran the Zoo, though it doesn’t quite have the same meaning that it does today. Rather than an insult, Seuss used it to describe a fictional creature. “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo/And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo/A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too,” he wrote.