It was the crowning achievement of a supremely imaginative artist. But The Cat in the Hat, which celebrates its 50th year this spring, was also a serious and highly technical response to controversies in reading education that reverberate to this day.
by Matt Freeman
The gauntlet had been thrown down three years before, in a very public forum: Life magazine. In the May 24, 1954, issue of Life, celebrated journalist and Hiroshima author John Hersey’s article “Why Do Students Bog Down on the First R?” criticized school basal readers, or “primers.” He bemoaned their “insipid illustrations” and the “abnormally courteous, unnaturally clean boys and girls.”
Hersey said that bookstores offered “brighter, livelier books,” and he challenged educational publishers to offer the same sort of compelling works. Hersey even named names: Why should the primers not have, he asked, “drawings like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children’s illustrators, Tenniel, Howard Pyle, ‘Dr. Seuss,’ Walt Disney?”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrator John Tenniel was long dead, as was American illustrator Howard Pyle. Disney had a day job making movies. But Theodor “Ted” Seuss Geisel was available. Geisel had a day job, too—he was working in the top ranks of the advertising business. According to Philip Nel, author of the forthcoming book The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (Random House, 2007), Geisel’s contract to do advertising for Standard Oil prohibited him from doing many other sorts of creative work, with one notable exception: children’s books.
Geisel was a serious artist and writer, a dogged perfectionist, and he cared a great deal about education and children’s literature. The dust jacket of The Cat in the Hat says of him, “From earliest youth, Dr. Seuss wanted to be an educator. He started preparing at Dartmouth, then at Oxford University in England. His plan was to teach English literature. Surely, he thought, after proper training, some Ivy Hall would call him to fill a dignified chair.”
The dust cover goes on to say how his love of “doodling” quickly became a career, with Geisel working for newspapers, magazines, and advertisers. But he was also an established children’s author by 1954, having already published nine children’s books, starting with And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Three of his works had been Caldecott Honor Books. The pseudonym “Dr. Seuss” was one Geisel had used as early as his senior year in Dartmouth.
Throughout his book, Nel notes that Geisel, not surprisingly a playful and imaginative person, often told different versions of stories about his publishing career. Not to aggrandize himself; he was inclined more to self-doubt than to boasting. But it evidently bored him to tell a story the same way every time, trammeled by the facts.
“This much is certain,” Nel says. “Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat because he was worried that children were not learning to read.” The Hersey article was an obvious goad; Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read, which came out in 1955, was another.
There was no question that Geisel could write and illustrate with imaginative genius. But The Cat in the Hat was also a huge technical challenge. The director of Houghton Mifflin’s education division at the time was William Spaulding, with whom Geisel had worked during World War II. “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down!” Spaulding told Geisel. But there was a further challenge: According to Nel, Spaulding told Geisel to limit the book’s vocabulary to no more than 225 words, choosing them from a list of 348.
At the time, the word method of reading instruction (called “look-say” by some) was popular, and children were taught to recognize common words by sight. Nel’s research shows that Geisel found this a tremendous technical hurdle. He had tried and abandoned two different stories because the necessary words for them weren’t on the list. And then, after months of frustration that nearly made him give up, he came up with a sketch of a cat wearing a battered stovepipe hat. He checked the list, and both words were there—cat, and hat.
It hardly seems necessary to describe the book that emerged. Virtually everyone in the English-speaking world who learned to read in the last 50 years is familiar with it, and many more who speak other languages, too. (Nel points out that the book’s rhythmic scheme and other characteristics make it a severe challenge for translators.)
It was a success from the start. There was certainly nothing insipid about the illustrations—they brimmed with verve and tension, and after a half-century they not only are not dated, but seem to live outside of their own or any era, in their own universe. The story, too, begins with the tension of cooped-up youngsters, then erupts into flagrant chaos as the Cat, like an archetypal mythical trickster, upsets the established order. He finally restores it, seconds before the children’s mother comes home. But the book ends with a question:
“Should we tell her about it?
Now, what SHOULD we do? Well...
What would YOU do
If your mother asked YOU?”
The accolades poured in, beginning with the first reviews. Margaret S. Libby in the New York Herald Tribune remarked on both the challenge and the result: “Restricting his vocabulary...and shortening his verse has given a certain riotous and extravagant unity, a wild restraint that is pleasing.”
The accolades continue to this day, among them the National Education Association’s Read Across America, held every year on or around March 2 as a celebration of Geisel’s birthday. Random House, which published the book for the public (Houghton Mifflin brought out the school-use edition) and Dr. Seuss Enterprises have partnered with First Book to create Project 236 (see www.seussville.com/CITH_50th), named for the number of words from the prescribed list Geisel actually used. But probably the deepest tribute is the book’s continued popularity. In 2001, Publishers Weekly listed the all-time bestselling children’s books. In all, Dr. Seuss had sold 71,186,554, and The Cat in the Hat was number nine on the list. (by comparison, J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, had sold 25,651,045, although she’s now up over 200 million.)
The controversies that inspired the book continue, and educators and other stakeholders struggle to balance interest with ease of reading. But with The Cat in the Hat, the stars aligned in a way that may not soon be repeated. There are wonderful children’s books with minimalist texts—titles by Margaret Wise Brown and Eric Carle come to mind. But it seems appropriate, on this half-century anniversary, to doff a red-and-white-striped hat to Ted Geisel the serious craftsman and Dr. Seuss the imaginative genius. It may be another 50 years or more before a similarly two-sided genius comes along to fashion a story so very easy to read and so very hard to put down.
Matt Freeman is a freelance writer and the former managing editor of Reading Today.
A wild restraint: Reading education and The Cat in the Hat. (February 2007). Reading Today, 24(4), 27.
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