Dartmouth has named its medical school the Geisel School of Medicine. The school’s philanthropist namesake is one of the college’s most famous alums: Dr. Seuss. Theodore Geisel did not get his “doctor” title at Dartmouth College – he gave it to himself later as a satirist – but he did pick up his penname, Seuss, at the Ivy League school.
Geisel took to writing under a pseudonym when he was banned from submitting work to the school paper for bringing moonshine to a campus party.
Self-described Dartmouth “Seussologist”, Donald Pease, says that Geisel worked as an ad-man on Madison Avenue, and a hawkish political cartoonist before changing gears after World War II.
Pease: and now what I wanna do is write for the next generation, to help them get the war mentality out of them, to help them get the aggression out of their psyches.
Pease says the children’s books made Theodore and his wife Audrey Geisel’s creative enterprise one of the most profitable on the planet.
