La Jolla, Calif. (AP) -- Theodor Seuss Geisel, the Dr. Seuss whose rhyming children's classics delighted generations of children and parents, has died. He was 87.

Geisel, author of The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and dozens of other books, died Tuesday night at his home with his family at his bedside. He had been ill for several months.

He wrote and illustrated 47 books, selling more than 100 million copies in 18 languages. He was awarded a 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his contribution to children's literature.

Geisel's works were journeys into nonsense, magical worlds of truffula trees, ziffs and zuffs and nerkles and nerds, where top-hatted cats run rampant through youngsters' homes while parents are away.

They often included subtle messages on issues important to him, from internationalism to environmentalism.
In his 1984 best seller, The Butter Battle Book, he offered a parable for the atomic age.

Geisel was childless himself -- after his first wife's death in 1967, he married Audrey Stone Dimond, a mother of two.

Born March 2, 1904, in Springfield, Mass., son of a brewer who ran a zoo during Prohibition, Geisel graduated in 1925 from Dartmouth, where he drew cartoons for the humor magazine Jack-O-Lantern.

During a year studying literature at Oxford University in England, he ret another American literature student, Helen Palmer, who encouraged Geisel's artistic career.

Geisel drifted to Paris, where he mingled with Lost Generation writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

He returned to the United States in 1927 to marry Palmer and to pursue his hope of being a novelist. The depression forced him to put the great American novel on hold and he went to work writing two-line gags for humor magazines Judge and Life. It was on a spoof of scientific developments that he first used the name that would become his trademark. He added "Dr." to his middle name to sound more scientific.

Through the 1950s, Geisel wrote a couple of children's books a year, capped in 1957 by the publication of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat.

Geisel is survived by his wife, stepdaughters, Lea and Lark, his niece, Peggy Owens, and her son Theodore Owens, of Los Angeles. At Geisel's request, no funeral was planned and the body was to be cremated.