Pease traced his inspiration to write the book back to 1990 when he received the Ted and Helen Geisel 3rd Century Professorship in the Humanities. Pease has been conducting research for the book since he presented a series of talks at the inauguration of the Geisel Library in San Diego, he said.
He began work on the project more seriously after working on the documentary "The Political Dr. Seuss" with director Ron Lamothe. Oxford Press contracted him to write the book and he has spent the past two years working on the book "in earnest," he said.
The research material used in the book was gathered from newspaper articles, essays and books found in various libraries across the country, Pease said. He also had an honors student who wrote a "terrific" honors thesis on Dr. Seuss in 1994, he said.
The book focuses on the relationship between events in Theodor Geisel's life and the artwork that he created, Pease said. The book describes the vast range of Geisel's career that includes not only his prolific work as a children's author but also the time he spent as an ad-man, a satirical cartoonist and even a filmmaker under Frank Capra during World War II.
Pease said his book helps to round out existing works on Geisel's life.
"Other work that's published on Dr. Seuss either treats the life and the work as independent of each other or treats the life without the work," he said.
Pease also discovered that Geisel's relationship with Dartmouth was "even more intimate" than he had previously known, he said.
Geisel named characters in several of his children's books after Dartmouth classmates, Pease said. For example, the title character of "Horton Hears a Who" is named after Horton Conrad, one of Geisel's classmates, Pease said. The Wahoo River, which is featured in the book "I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew" gets its name from a common class cheer "Wah Hoo Wah", Pease said. Other books also include sign names that are based on the names of Geisel's Dartmouth peers. Geisel often dedicated books to former Dartmouth classmates, he said.
"Dartmouth was a kind of world elsewhere, a second world, where everything that had come apart in his first world was restored into a kind of magical space," Pease said of Geisel's experience at Dartmouth in an interview with Vermont Public Radio.
Pease made connections between events early in Geisel's life, particularly the anti-German prejudice he experienced growing up in Springfield, Mass., and the themes that appear in his work. His first book "And to Think I That I Saw it on Mulberry Street" relates to his experience walking back and forth from school as a child when he was targeted for his German heritage, Pease said.
Geisel also acquired his pen name "Dr. Seuss" during his tenure at Dartmouth, publishing several cartoons in the Jack-O-Lantern under that name.
Pease said he is now working on a book on 19th century American renaissance text with Duke University Press that will be part of the "New Americanists" series. Pease also published "The New American Exceptionalism" earlier this year.
