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This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

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From green eggs and ham to how the Grinch stole Christmas, we're all familiar with the work

of Dr. Seuss.

But the story of how he actually became the author we know and love is far from short and simple. Brian J. Jones,

author of Becoming Dr. Seuss, is here with the full story of the man behind his pen name.

Dr. Seuss was born Theodore Geisel, Theodore Seuss Geisel, in fact, in Springfield, Massachusetts.

He is the son of a very successful brewing family.

They're German immigrants who had his grandfather had come to the United States and set up a brewing company that was very successful.

And so Seousse was around German

brewers, loved listening to his German ancestors, you know, his family members, talking

Germany. He would sit at the top of the stairs and listen to the conversation downstairs. He loved

the sound of that language and how if you have a German word and you want to qualify something,

you just keep adding on to the word and it gets longer and more interesting.

At one point, he talks about going to school during World War I and having children chasing him and throwing coal at him saying, kill the Kaiser.

They knew he was a German immigrant.

That always sort of stayed with Seuss a lot of his life.

I think that's where he gets sort of his love for the underdog and for the oppressed.

And I think a book like The Sneaches is probably sort of born out of that sheer feeling of being the outsider, being the other, that he experienced even as a child when people threw Cole at him for being German.

His mother is Henrietta Seuss, or Sois is actually the correct way of pronouncing the name. Sois is his mother's maiden name. That's where he gets the name Seuss from. Seuss always said that, you know, it rhymed with mother goose or somebody pointed that out to him, so he was always okay with people pronouncing it Seuss. His mother, he often said, is the one who

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