On the day after Christmas in 1956, Ted Geisel looked in the mirror and didnt like what he saw. The 53 years of lines and weather on his face were not, he thought, dignified. They seemed corroded, maybe even corrupt.

It was not that he disliked what he did. Or at least, most of it. He wrote picture books for children, and The New York Times and The New Yorker approved. Sales were sufficient to justify a home in the beachfront San Diego district of La Jolla. Ted liked the sand. He liked the surf. He liked being asked to serve on the board of the San Diego Fine Arts Museum. Most of all, he liked working with his wife, unofficial editor and creative partner of 30 years, Helen. But his royalties were not quite sufficient to support the medical bills for Helens mysterious illness.

Two years ago, she had retired early from a party citing severe pain in her feet something more than the ordinary trouble with high heels. Within hours she was paralyzed from the neck down, eventually losing even her ability to speak. The doctors believed Helens immune system had gone haywire and attacked her neurological system. It was as sound a diagnosis as any, but it hadnt led to a particular treatment, and Helens recovery had been arduous. Once she was out of the iron lung, Ted spent hours reading letters and literature to her, wheeling her to windows for a good view or whizzing down hospital corridors for thrills. By Christmas 1956 she was walking and talking, complaining only of a persistent pain in her feet that felt, she said, as if she were wearing shoes a few sizes too small.

Ted took on some ad work to keep the bills from getting the best of him, drawing billboard pictures for Standard Oil. The work was much easier than concocting narratives and language lessons for tots, but it left him feeling dry, denuded, ready for a drink.

And Ted loved a good cocktail; his excess with alcohol extended back to his college days. His smoking habit, too, had a tendency to accelerate into chain territory when he was working hardest. These chemical indulgences didnt seem to detract from his work. If anything, he was producing the best stuff of his career. But it was taking a toll on his psyche. His passion was becoming a commodity. He was becoming a commodity. His publisher, Random House, had taken to releasing his books in late autumn, timed for the Christmas market. Was he teaching kids to read, or just giving parents something to buy?

The whole enterprise was starting to feel phony. Were his books really any different from his side hustle in highway billboards? Was Christmas itself about anything more than money?

A year and a half earlier, hed dashed off a 32-line illustrated poem for the magazine Redbook, a little morality tale in which a greasy con man convinces a nice, regular guy to buy a piece of string by persuading him it was better than the sun itself. When Ted looked in the mirror on that December morning, he saw the villain of his own creation: the Grinch.

The Grinchy Paradox

By the time Ted and Helen released a full-fledged book on the Grinch in December 1957, his character had transformed from the charlatan of the Redbook cartoon into a bona fide hero.

Im really on the Grinchs side, Ted told journalist Sally Hammond in 1969. The Grinch is against the commercialization of Christmas, even though hes a mean old so-and-so. ... I was cheering for this guy.

This account of how the Grinch came to be is mostly compiled from three biographies Dartmouth English professor Donald E. Peases Theodore Seuss Geisel, the intimate portrait Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel by family friends Judith and Neil Morgan, and Brian Jay Jones Becoming Dr. Seuss. Other notes are gleaned from Richard H. Minears analysis of Geisels early political cartoons, Dr. Seuss Goes to War, and various obituaries and news articles .

Its difficult for any parent of young children not to identify at least a little with some of the Grinchs gripes. All the Who girls and boys would wake bright and early. Theyd rush for their toys! And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise! Its a wonderful thing to see a child entranced by a toy, but it can also be a bit much.

Though the parallels between the Grinch and Charles Dickens anti-Christmas miser Ebeneezer Scrooge are unmistakable, the characters experience very different final acts. Scrooge undergoes an epiphanic reform and decides to reject money in favor of love and family. In the Seuss fable, it is not the Grinch who changes but the world. When the Whos down in Whoville wake up and see their toys are gone, they dont all cry Boo-hoo! as predicted they go outside and hold hands and sing songs anyway. This spirit of community warms the Grinchs heart and persuades him to give back the toys he has stolen.

The Grinch can afford to be magnanimous. The toys have become superfluous. The Grinch wins.

There is an inescapable irony surrounding the Grinch and his status as an American Christmas staple. The green prophet of anti-consumerism is himself an enduring Christmas commodity, his legacy secured not by teachers and churches but by television and, yes, toys.

Hollywood has enhanced this Grinchy paradox, but the tension goes all the way back to the books beginnings. The major Seuss production in 1957 wasnt the Grinch, but The Cat in the Hat, a book that for 11 months of every subsequent year remains the most iconic offering from the Seuss catalog.

Ted dealt with his post-Christmas malaise by working on a book that was extremely wholesome and totally un-Christmasy. Textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin wanted to jump the market for elementary school reading primers. Educators were taking the laggard U.S. literacy rate seriously it was a question of national pride during the Cold War and big pedagogical thinkers of the day had noticed that kids actually seemed to like the Seuss books. The early stages of reading are difficult for children, and the books designed for the youngest readers were extremely dull, filled with bland characters like Dick and Jane who dont really do anything more than See Spot run. If Dr. Seuss could make reading exciting, even silly, then educators would have a better shot at setting kids up for success.

Ted and Helen had been on a roll. Starting in 1954, theyd been producing nonstop classics Horton Hears a Who!, the A-B-C book On Beyond Zebra! and the fantasy romp If I Ran the Circus adored by critics, teachers and parents alike. But they operated at a relatively high level for childrens literature. Horton swelled to nearly 70 pages, most of them filled with dense blocks of text peppered with words that most children didnt know and certainly couldnt read on their own.

The Cat in the Hat would be different. Houghton Mifflin asked Dr. Seuss to tell this tale with no more than 250 simple words and to make it easy for children to identify the specific objects described, keeping adjectives to a minimum and eliminating the zany nonsense words that were part of the Seuss brand.

That was tricky enough, but the hard part was making it fun. If you drop the charm, Ted told the Boston Herald American about The Cat in the Hat, you have a dictionary. The stroke of genius was the Cat himself a debonair rogue who swashbuckles through a family home pulling stunts and breaking rules. Reading, the book suggested, was edgy and cool maybe even as cool as a talking cat balancing on a ball while holding a cake.

Houghton Mifflin released The Cat in the Hat in March 1957, hoping to generate enough buzz to persuade school systems to pick it up for the fall curriculum. The publisher was so intent on tackling the institutional market that it let Random House a competitor who had handled all of the previous Seuss material collect whatever it wanted from sales to retail bookstores.

That proved to be a spectacularly bad bet. Schools didnt bite. Dick and Jane would maintain their hegemony over educational officialdom for decades to come. But The Cat in the Hat was a retail smash. Horton Hatches the Egg, the first true masterpiece in the Seuss canon, had sold fewer than 6,000 copies when it was released in 1940. The Cat in the Hat quickly sold 250,000. Dr. Seuss went from a name that book critics knew to a name that everyone knew.

The Cat in the Hat changed childrens publishing, demonstrating that selling directly to families could be a bigger and more influential business than selling to school systems. Dr. Seuss may well have been improving American literacy, but what Ted and Helen had created was also unmistakably a retail commodity. The Cat was famous the way movie stars were famous, the product not of public education but of consumer capitalism.

Random House, of course, wanted another Seuss book in time for Christmas 1957. After doing their good deed for childrens literacy, Ted and Helen were happy to comply. What they came up with was an anti-Cat in the Hat. Where the Cat flouted house rules, reveling in cakes and kites and cleaning up only to keep from getting caught, the Grinch was a relentless stickler, possessed by the Puritan asceticism of a cave-dwelling monk. Visually the two characters invite comparison nix the whiskers and the hat and swap out the Cats rounded gloves for pointed fingers, and you have the Grinch. Placed side-by-side, the covers of the two books look like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde cartoon.

With the Seussian imagination freed from Houghton Mifflins pedagogical constraints, Ted cranked out nearly the entire narrative for How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in a few short weeks. But the ending bedeviled him for months. Like all of the best Seuss books, the Grinch carries a strong moral current, and Ted worried about laying it on too thick.

The message of the book is we are merchandising Christmas too much, he told the Chicago Tribune in 1982. But I found I could take it into very sloppy morality at the end. I tried Old Testamenty things, New Testamenty things. It was appalling how gooey I was getting.

Helens chief concerns were with the art, according to biographer Brian Jay Jones. Youve got the Papa Who too big, she told Ted after one attempted finale. Now he looks like a bug.

Well they are bugs, Ted argued.

They are not bugs. The Whos are just small people.

Helens vision would win out in the TV special a decade later, but the Whos in the book do resemble talking insects, the descendants of Teds early ad contracts with Standard Oils premier bug spray. Her influence over the book is comprehensive the narrator wonders if the Grinchs shoes are a few sizes too small before concluding that, actually, its his heart that is undersized.

After wrestling over different religious themes for the ending, Ted and Helen decided to cut out the Bible altogether and let the Grinch settle down to dinner with the Whos, slicing the roast beast as everyone lives happily ever after.

Riding the Cats coattails, the Grinch was a commercial slam-dunk, the biggest thing to happen to Christmas since Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer stormed the Billboard charts in 1949. But there were a lot of books that sold well for Christmas in 1957 thats what books do this time of year.

No, the Grinchs bid for immortality came not on the printed page but in Hollywood. And it was Hollywood that would transform Dr. Seuss from a popular childrens author into an American icon.