It’s the birthday of “Ted” Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss, and we thought it would be fun to show some of his early work. Most people—including, last time I checked, his Wikipedia biographers—are unaware that Seuss actually started his career selling pesticides. That’s right—Theodor Geisel used his enormous talent and fantastical imagination as part of the chemical manufacturers’ propaganda war on bugs.

We don’t really hold it against him—the toxic effects of pesticides weren’t widely known then. Pesticides were seen as benign and beneficial.

In any event, the man the world would come to know (and love) as Dr. Seuss more than redeemed himself with 1971’s The Lorax, a beautiful fable on the environmental dangers of industrialization.

You can see more of Seuss’s early work for the pesticide industry in Will Allen’s The War on Bugs.

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