The work of the New Americanists, and Pease in particular, challenged existing paradigms of reading, in particular the liberal consensus that depended upon a separation between culture and the public sphere.
Pease's response to Crews appeared in an essay published in 1990 in boundary 2 as "New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon".
This book places Dr. Seuss in a pantheon of great writers including Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Benjamin Franklin, T.S.
[6] Pease provides what he terms a "psychobiography" of Dr. Seuss by interpreting the transformation of Theodor Geisel from "an artist tycoon of Madison Avenue into a world-renowned author of children’s books".
[7] Jenny Williams, writing for WIRED, calls Pease's book “an academic study of the content, meaning and motivations of Geisel's work".
He has received two National Endowment for the Humanities grants to direct programs for college teachers on the subject of nineteenth-century American Literature.