SAN DIEGO – The unassuming hallways of the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego house the artwork and writings of the late Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Here you can flip through the original sketch for “The Cat in the Hat” and see notes in the margins with printer instructions. If you look closely at the framed draft of “Oh, the Places You’ll Go,” you can see where Geisel taped up scrap paper for editing.
The Dr. Seuss Archives offer a glimpse into the mind of the storyteller whose funny rhymes changed children’s literature. He died in 1991, and his widow, Audrey Geisel, donated most of his works to the library.
Last May, publishers Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Penguin Random House visited the archives to find new marketing materials for the 70th anniversary of “The Cat in the Hat” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” What they discovered was completely unexpected.
“Sing the 50 United States!”, housed in a file of approximately 20,000 pages, was a completed, unpublished manuscript. Geisel also designed what appeared to be the cover.
“This is kismet,” says Kat Reynolds, executive editor of Dr. Seuss Publishing and Beginner Books at Penguin Random House. “It is a cosmic coincidence that this manuscript in our archives has been gifted to us at this precise moment to truly celebrate Ted Geisel and his contributions to children’s literature and the American canon as a whole.”
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This is not Seuss’ first posthumous book. In 2015, “Which Pet Should I Get?” was published from a nearly completed manuscript under the direction of Audrey Geisel. This project did not remain in the archives and remained in a drawer at Geisel’s home in La Jolla, California. In 2019, The Museum of Horses, which he completed with illustrator Andrew Joyner, was published based on unrhymed manuscripts and sketches.
However, the level of perfection of “Let’s Sing 50 America!” was exceptional.
“Ted Geisel gave us a perfect manuscript. We didn’t have to change a single punctuation mark,” Reynolds said in a separate interview in New York City, sitting in a Seuss-themed conference room in his Penguin Random House offices.
“Sing” hit store shelves on June 2, just over a year after the manuscript was discovered. Reynolds says this is an unprecedented timeline because there were no story edits or grammar changes. In fact, when we spoke in the archives, Susan Brandt, CEO of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, said candidly that she didn’t mind the awkward “Ah…ah…ah…ah! Okla, Oklahoma!” But it remained because Geisel wrote it.
“This time they were looking at it letter by letter, punctuation by punctuation… making sure readers got the most authentic version,” Reynolds says.
The main challenge was to finish the illustrations. Geisel left sketches that resembled storyboards, so it was known that Geisel intended for his assistants, Kat and Little Cats, to lead the story. When publishing a new Seuss book, there is a crucial difference between interpreting Geisel’s style in a new spin-off book (such as If It Were My Birthday Party, written “by” the Cat in the Hat) and “ghosting” Geisel as in this book.
“It depends on the project. Are you really trying to get as close to the guy as possible, or are you trying to honor him?” Brandt says. “This tells us we’re getting closer.”
Veteran illustrator Tom Brannon completed the image. Because Geisel was so particular about color, Reynolds’ team decided to only use colors that appeared in “The Cat in the Hat” and “I Can Read With My Eyes Shut” (which also featured cats).
Check out exclusive sketches and manuscript drafts from the Dr. Seuss archives
The manuscript is undated, and there is no record of when or why Geisel wrote “Sing,” although it would have been written after Hawaii became a state in 1959.
“I think this was a difficult book, and that’s probably why he didn’t publish it, because it’s very different from his usual rhyme scheme,” says Linda Corey Claassen, director of special collections and archives at the University of California, San Diego Library. “Whether he just couldn’t work on it or whether he was trying to perfect it or change something, who knows?”
Clasen and Brandt theorize that Geisel may have intended this for “The Cat in the Hat Songbook,” published in 1967. In his draft, Geisel includes the audio descriptor “groan” before the line “Oklahoma.” It is faithfully sung in the book’s companion song. There are other written musical instructions, such as the “Short Worried Chord” when Kat forgets her last 50th state.
Looking at Geisel’s draft is like looking at an instruction manual. “For children’s voices, the younger the better,” he wrote at the beginning of a typed copy of “Sing 50 America!” These manuscript pages and sketches, shared exclusively with USA TODAY, show many drafts, sometimes with only minor revisions, as Geisel tinkered with the state’s order and how it would sound when read aloud.
“He worked. He took his job of writing the kids’ primaries very seriously,” Brandt says. “It took him over a year, if not more, to write a book. You can probably also see in some of his writing his frustration that people think it’s easy.”
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Brandt believes there are even more useful works in Geisel’s archive. There are unfinished lessons on telling time and spelling, including one called “How Well Can You Spell?” It’s “almost” finished.
“You can see him playing with things he thought kids should know and learn,” Brandt says.
In other ways, Seuss’ new ventures are spreading out from himself. A year after he canceled the publication and sale of six titles containing racist and insensitive imagery, his estate established the Seuss Studio, helmed by a diverse group of emerging writers. These authors are using unpublished Geisel sketches in new picture books. Author Lara Watkins used a never-before-seen sketch of a worm as her main character, Norbit, in her book for beginners, Hello, Sun!
Dr. Seuss Enterprises has a penchant for Seuss books that “stand the test of time” and illustrations that never found a place within the stories. The draft sketches and words allow publishers to extend Seuss’s world to a new era of authors and readers.
“We can keep the noise behind us,” Brandt said. “They resonate, resonate, and resonate.”
Claire Mulroy is USA TODAY’s books reporter, covering hot releases, chatting with authors, and diving into reading culture. please find her on instagramsubscribe to our weekly magazine book newsletter Or tell her what you’re reading cmulroy@usatoday.com.
