Dr. Seuss had writer’s block. Then, he spotted the Lorax in Africa.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Seuss was struggling. 

Amid the growing environmentalist movement in the United States, punctuated by President Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the establishment of the now-beleaguered Endangered Species Act, Dr. Seuss — otherwise known as Theodore Geisel — wanted to write a conservation-themed book for children. 

But stricken with writer’s block, he couldn’t.

“He struggled and struggled to do it,” Nathaniel Dominy, an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist at Dartmouth College, said in an interview. 

More about Science, Conservation, Environmentalism, Monkey, and Dr. Seuss