Helen Palmer Geisel

Early life and college

Helen Marion Palmer was born in New York in 1898 and spent her childhood in Bedford–Stuyvesant, a prosperous Brooklyn neighborhood. As a child, she contracted polio but recovered from it almost completely. Her father, George Howard Palmer, was an ophthalmologist, and he died when she was 11. She graduated from Wellesley College with honors in 1920, then spent three years teaching English at Girls High School in Brooklyn before moving with her mother to England to attend Oxford University.

She met her future husband, Ted Geisel, in class at Oxford. She had a profound influence on his life, starting with her suggestion that he should be an artist rather than an English professor. She later stated, "Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals. So I set to work diverting him; here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should be earning a living doing that." They married in 1927 and never had children, as Helen was unable to.

Post-war success

Following World War II, Ted worked in Hollywood expanding his propaganda films into films for general release. RKO commissioned him to adapt his Your Job in Japan; he brought Helen on as a collaborator and the two shared a writing credit. The finished project, Design for Death, won the 1947 Academy Award for best documentary feature.

For about a decade following World War II, Ted worked to feed a booming children's book market, creating a bevy of books. During this period, he relied heavily on the encouragement and editorial input of Helen. In fact, throughout much of his career, he relied on her support.

Illness and suicide

Helen committed suicide in 1967 with an overdose of barbiturates after a series of illnesses (including cancer) spanning 13 years. She was also despondent over Ted's affair with Audrey Stone Dimond. Feeling unable to live without him, Helen wrote in her suicide note:

"Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, 'failure, failure, failure...' I love you so much ... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you ... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed ... Sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years ..."

Ted later described his reaction to her death: "I didn't know whether to kill myself, burn the house down, or just go away and get lost." About Helen's death, Ted's niece Peggy commented: "Whatever Helen did, she did it out of absolute love for Ted." Peggy called Helen's death "her last and greatest gift to him."

Works

Helen Palmer's best-known book is Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday?, published in 1963. This book combined Palmer's stories with photographs by Lynn Fayman, as did two other books: I Was Kissed by a Seal at the Zoo (1962) and Why I Built the Boogle House (1964). The photographs in I Was Kissed by a Seal at the Zoo were taken at the San Diego Zoo in Balboa Park, San Diego, California, and featured children from the Francis Parker School in San Diego interacting with the zoo's animals and staff. She also expanded the Dr. Seuss short story "Gustav the Goldfish" into the book A Fish Out Of Water, which was illustrated by P. D. Eastman.