Today is the birthday of Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. He would have been 101 years old. A lot of kids in a lot of schools are about to get a full dose of The Cat in the Hat.
In his politics, Geisel was a liberal, and his liberalism informed much of his work, especially in his late period (The Lorax is an environmental manifesto, The Butter Battle Book is a call for disarmament). But a couple of his titles were profoundly conservative. Pro-lifers have embraced Horton Hears a Who (“a person’s a person no matter how small”). My own favorite is the anti-utopian I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, which I wrote about here.
UPDATE: Oops. Did my math wrong. Seuss was born in 1904, so today he would have been 106. Now you know why I majored in English.