''Happy Birthday to You!'' is a 1959

children's book Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader. Children's ...

Dr. Seuss Theodor Seuss Geisel (;"Seuss"
'' picture book A picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. With the narrative told primarily through text, they are distinct from comics, which do so primarily through sequential images. The images ...

Plot

It deals with a fantastic land called Katroo, where the Birthday Bird throws the reader an amazing party on their special day. It consists of a running description of a fantastical celebration, narrated in the second person, of the reader's birthday, from dawn to late night. The celebration includes fantastical and colorful gifts, foods and a whirl of activities all arranged by the Birthday Bird for the reader's birthday. It focuses on the reader's

self-actualization Self-actualization, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, is the highest level of psychological development, where personal potential is fully realized after basic bodily and ego needs have been fulfilled. Self-actualization was coined by the organism ...

and concludes with the happy and exhausted reader falling blissfully asleep. A popular Seuss paragraph in this book reads: "Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you".

Adaptations

Although ''Happy Birthday to You!'' was not directly adapted, The Birthday Bird appears in an episode of ''

The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss ''The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss'' is an American children's puppet television series based on characters created by Dr. Seuss, produced by The Jim Henson Company. It aired from October 13, 1996, to December 28, 1998, on Nickelodeon. It combin ...

''. The book is dedicated to the author's "good friends" and "The Children of

San Diego County San Diego County (), officially the County of San Diego, is a county in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 3,298,634, making it California's second-most populous county and the fi ...

References

1959 children's books American picture books Children's fiction books English-language books Children's books about birds Children's books about birthdays Books by Dr. Seuss Random House books {{child-picture-book-stub