Lost Dr. Seuss Stories to Be Republished

August 7, 2014

Dr. Seuss

Random House Books for Young Readers will release a collection of four little-known Dr. Seuss stories this September, titled Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories. The tales were originally published in Redbook magazine in the 1950’s but have never before been released in picture book form.

The stories include earlier incarnations of well-known characters such as Horton the Elephant and the Grinch. In the title story, which dates to 1951, a critter-like character named Kwuggerbug fools Horton into journeying across a crocodile-infested river and up a treacherous mountain in search of “a Beezlenut tree where some Beezlenuts grow,” ultimately cheating him of his share of Beezlenuts. Other stories include “The Hubub and the Grinch,” “Marco Comes Late,” and “How Officer Pat Saved the Whole Town,” all of which The Guardian describes in further detail.

Charles D. Cohen, a Seuss scholar, tracked down the magazines that originally featured these stories, calling them “fresh encounters with old friends and familiar places.” “For the most part, those magazines were tossed out when the next month's issue arrived and the stories were largely forgotten," Cohen writes in his introduction to the collection.

Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories follows an earlier collection of seven magazine stories, Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories, which was published in 2011 and also contains an introduction by Cohen. According to Random House, with the new collection, “Seuss fans will learn more about Horton’s integrity, Marco’s amazing imagination, a narrowly avoided disaster on Mulbery Street, and a devious Grinch.”

In a review of the collection, Publishers Weekly said the stories were “by no means gems, [but] these archives suggest how [Suess] tinkered with characters, developed his signature tetrameter, and commented on ethical issues, circa 1950.”

Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, authored some of the most beloved children’s books of the twentieth century, including The Cat in the Hat and Horton Hears a Who. He died in 1991 at his home in La Jolla, California at 87 years old.

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