In the spring of 1925, Theodor Seuss Geisel was a senior at Dartmouth College and editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, the college’s popular humor magazine.
Then he got caught drinking in his dorm room.
It was Prohibition, and one night shortly before Easter, Geisel and nine friends gathered in his room with a pint of gin. Geisel later remembered the incident with characteristic wit: “We had a pint of gin for ten people, so that proves nobody was really drinking.” Dartmouth’s administration was less amused. Geisel and his friends were placed on probation, and he was forced to give up his extracurricular activities, including his editorship of the Jack-O-Lantern, according to his own later account in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
For an aspiring cartoonist, that created a problem. It did not stop him from drawing.
Geisel quietly continued contributing to the magazine, only now he hid behind a collection of pseudonyms. Among the names that began appearing were D. G. Rossetti, T. Seuss, and simply “Seuss.” As the National Endowment for the Humanities notes, Seuss was not an entirely invented identity: it was Geisel’s middle name and his mother’s maiden name.
And so, in a rather unlikely twist, a punishment for drinking in a dorm room helped create one of the most recognizable names in children’s literature.
After Dartmouth, Geisel continued writing and drawing professionally. While contributing cartoons to Judge magazine in the late 1920s, he experimented with increasingly elaborate versions of his pseudonym, including “Dr. Theophrastus Seuss.” He later explained in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine that he had added the “Dr.” simply “to make me sound more professorial.” Eventually the name was shortened to the form that would become famous: Dr. Seuss.
The doctorate, of course, was fictional. Geisel had studied at Oxford but never earned a Ph.D. The title was simply part of the persona.
Geisel would go on to write and illustrate more than 60 books and create some of the most recognizable characters in American children’s literature. He occasionally used other pen names as well. Books he wrote but did not illustrate appeared under “Theo. LeSieg”—Geisel spelled backward—and he used “Rosetta Stone” for Because a Little Bug Went Ka-Choo!!. His publisher, Penguin Random House, documents those alternate pen names alongside his better-known work as Dr. Seuss.
But none of those names came close to eclipsing Dr. Seuss.
It is a fittingly peculiar origin story: a Dartmouth senior gets caught drinking gin in his dorm room during Prohibition, loses his editorship, refuses to stop drawing, and begins disguising his work behind a pseudonym. The punishment was supposed to keep Theodor Geisel out of the college humor magazine.
Instead, it helped introduce Dr. Seuss.
Explore more stories