Wanda Gág and Dr. Seuss PDF

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Lecture on Wanda Wanda Gág  Wanted to make sure people spoke her name right- rhymes with dog.  She grew up in New Ulm, Minnesota. o The town was named after a town in Germany called Ulm. o The people that lived in the town were almost all over German descent. Up until WWI, the primary language in New Ulm was German.  Wanda’s father was an artist. He couldn’t make a living that way so he also painted houses and murals in churches.  Wanda wanted to be like her father and go to art school.  When Wanda was a teenager, her father died. It sent the family into a terrible time. At this time, there wasn’t social security and life insurance. Their financial fortunes fell terribly after the father’s death. The small town tried to chip in and help, but with that assistance also came from the Gág family’s point of view came unwanted advice. They said Wanda should drop out of school and work, which she didn’t want to do. This created tension between the family and town.  She ended up graduating and going to an art school in St. Paul. Sadly, the mother didn’t deal well with her husband’s death and their financial problems. She ended up drinking too much which led to her death after Wanda moved to St. Paul. They decided they were going to take the Gág kids and move them in with town members. The kids wanted to stay together so they asked for Wanda’s help. She came back and put the house on the market. She moved them to St. Paul and put her own dreams on hold. She worked in commercial art (pictures for advertisements, etc).  When the kids all graduated high school, she moved to New York.  Wanda was influenced the most by Vincent Van Gough.  She grew up reading Grimm’s fairy tales in German. Her dream of having a gallery in New York happened she got her own show and people came from all over to see her work. An art director recommended her doing a kids book. When this opportunity was presented to her she thought she should try it.  Millions of Cats o Published in 1928 o It became very successful and launched her career as a picture book author. o It was the first important one from an American writer. o Gutter- inside part of the spine of a book o Double spread- Image that goes across two pages. o Her younger brother wrote the lettering for the book. o Beginning of the book shows loneliness with the white background. The last page shoes the opposite with the old woman and man being enclosed with a little black area. The cat is between the old woman and man, holding them together. Theodor Seuss Geiser  His pen name is Dr. Seuss

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His father worked in a zoo He went off to college where he majored in English. He really liked to work on the student’s humor magazine doing cartoons. He never graduated his PHD from Oxford, but called himself Dr. Seuss anyway. He moved to New York and got a job doing commercial art. He got a job doing adds for insecticide. He made cartoons for them and they took off. He was making a lot of money doing this. He spent a lot of his money traveling with his wife. They went to Germany when Hitler was starting to rise with power. He began to do political cartoons making fun of the European faces at the time. This was the rise of his career as a political cartoonist. On the trip home on his was from Europe, he was in the actual room near the engine on the boat that had a weird rhythm. He came up with a phrase going with that rhythm that was ‘and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street’. This became the first children’s book he published. In the 1950’s the books to teach children how to read were the Dick and Jane books....