David Dennen (2012; version 1.0) Toward an Imaginology of Dr. Seuss 1 Introduction Around the middle of the twentieth century a quantitatively minor but nonetheless momentous trend can be detected in US children’s literature. There are not, perhaps, a very large number of books that could be said to belong to this trend; yet it consists of books by some of the most famous children’s (picture) book authors: Dr. Seuss, Crockett Johnson, Maurice Sendak. This trend, very simply, involved the portrayal of children’s mental lives, specifically their fantasies. The distinctiveness of this can be discerned by a comparison with earlier children’s literature. Since children’s book authors had begun to move away from rigorous didacticism in the mid-nineteenth century, stories for children related mainly folk or fairy tales or adventures set in contemporary times. 2 By the turn of the century, stories that took the characters and readers to fantastic places (places that were purported to be of the author’s individual imagination rather than from myth, history, or the contemporary world) also became popular: for example, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books (which began publication in 1900). But in almost all cases, the adventures of the children in these books were, within their fictional contexts, real. In Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), for example, Oz is, despite its unusual qualities, a real place that Dorothy visits, not a fantasy or illusion. 3 However, in many of the books of Seuss, Crockett, and Sendak, 1 This paper was presented at “The Politics of Children’s Literature (International Seminar on Children’s Literature),” Ravenshaw University, Cuttack, India (9–10 January 2012). The official, pre-conference title of the paper was “The Critical Imagination of Dr. Seuss.” I would like to thank Professor Diptiranjan Pattanaik for inspiring me to tackle this topic. 2 This shift and some of the reasons for it are noted by Mintz (2004: 185), Saler (2004: 141), and Whalley (2004: 322). 3 This is in contradistinction to the famous film version, The Wizard of Oz (1939), in which Oz, at least as usually interpreted, is a dream. This transformation of Oz’s status, coming as it does after three decades of Freudian influence, is a useful cultural barometer.