The Cat In The Hat
The Cat in the Hat is a 1957 children's book written and illustrated by American author Theodor Geisel, using the pen name Dr. Seuss. The story centers on a tall anthropomorphic cat who wears a red and white-striped top hat and a red bow tie. The Cat shows up at the house of Sally and her brother one rainy day when their mother is away. Despite the repeated objections of the children's fish, the Cat shows the children a few of his tricks in an attempt to entertain them. In the process, he and his companions, Thing One and Thing Two, wreck the house. As the children and the fish become more alarmed, the Cat produces a machine that he uses to clean everything up and disappears just before the children's mother comes home.
The Cat in the Hat
Geisel created the book in response to a debate in the United States about literacy in early childhood and the ineffectiveness of traditional primers such as those featuring Dick and Jane. Geisel was asked to write a more entertaining primer by William Spaulding, whom he had met during World War II and who was then director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin. However, because Geisel was already under contract with Random House, the two publishers agreed to a deal: Houghton Mifflin published the education edition, which was sold to schools, and Random House published the trade edition, which was sold in bookstores.
Geisel gave varying accounts of how he created The Cat in the Hat, but in the version he told most often, he was so frustrated with the word list from which he could choose words to write his story that he decided to scan the list and create a story based on the first two rhyming words he found. The words he found were cat and hat. The book was met with immediate critical and commercial success. Reviewers praised it as an exciting alternative to traditional primers. Three years after its debut, the book had already sold over a million copies, and in 2001, Publishers Weekly listed the book at number nine on its list of best-selling children's books of all time. The book's success led to the creation of Beginner Books, a publishing house centered on producing similar books for young children learning to read. In 1983, Geisel said, "It is the book I'm proudest of because it had something to do with the death of the Dick and Jane primers."
Since its publication, The Cat in the Hat has become one of Dr. Seuss' most famous books, with the Cat himself becoming his signature creation. The book was adapted into a 1971 animated television special and a 2003 live-action film, and the Cat has been included in many Dr. Seuss media.
The story begins as an unnamed boy who is the narrator of the book sits alone with his sister Sally in their house on a cold and rainy day, staring wistfully out the window. Then they hear a loud bump which is quickly followed by the arrival of the Cat in the Hat, a tall anthropomorphic cat in a red and white-striped top hat and a red bow tie, who proposes to entertain the children with some tricks that he knows. The children's pet fish refuses, insisting that the Cat should leave. The Cat then responds by balancing the fish on the tip of his umbrella. The game quickly becomes increasingly trickier, as the Cat balances himself on a ball and tries to balance many household items on his limbs until he falls on his head, dropping everything he was holding. The fish admonishes him again, but the Cat in the Hat just proposes another game.
The Cat brings in a big red box from outside, from which he releases two identical characters, or "Things" as he refers them to, with blue hair and red suits called Thing One and Thing Two. The Things cause more trouble, such as flying kites in the house, knocking pictures off the wall and picking up the children's mother's new polka-dotted dress. All this comes to an end when the fish spots the children's mother out the window. In response, the boy catches the Things in a net and the Cat, apparently ashamed, stores them back in the big red box. He takes it out the front door as the fish and the children survey the mess he has made. But the Cat soon returns, riding a machine that picks everything up and cleans the house, delighting the fish and the children. The Cat then leaves just before their mother arrives, and the fish and the children are back where they started at the beginning of the story. As she steps in, the mother asks the children what they did while she was out, but the children are hesitant and do not answer. The story ends with the question, "What would you do if your mother asked you?"
Theodor Geisel, writing as Dr. Seuss, created The Cat in the Hat partly in response to the May 24, 1954, Life magazine article by John Hersey titled "Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading".[1][2] In the article, Hersey was critical of school primers like those featuring Dick and Jane:
In the classroom boys and girls are confronted with books that have insipid illustrations depicting the slicked-up lives of other children... All feature abnormally courteous, unnaturally clean boys and girls.... In bookstores anyone can buy brighter, livelier books featuring strange and wonderful animals and children who behave naturally, i.e., sometimes misbehave... Given incentive from school boards, publishers could do as well with primers.[3]
This article caught the attention of William Spaulding, who had met Geisel during the war and who was then the director of Houghton Mifflin's education division.[5] Spaulding had also read the best-selling 1955 book Why Johnny Can't Read by Rudolf Flesch.[6] Flesch, like Hersey, criticized primers as boring but also criticized them for teaching reading through word recognition rather than phonics.[7] In 1955, Spaulding invited Geisel to dinner in Boston where he proposed that Geisel create a book "for six- and seven-year-olds who had already mastered the basic mechanics of reading".[5] He reportedly challenged, "Write me a story that first-graders can't put down!"[5]
At the back of Why Johnny Can't Read, Flesch had included 72 lists of words that young children should be able to read, and Spaulding provided Geisel with a similar list.[7] Geisel later told biographers Judith and Neil Morgan that Spaulding had supplied him with a list of 348 words that every six-year-old should know and insisted that the book's vocabulary be limited to 225 words.[5] However, according to Philip Nel, Geisel gave varying numbers in interviews from 1964 to 1969.[8] He variously claimed that he could use between 200 and 250 words from a list of between 300 and 400; the finished book contains 236 different words.[8]
Geisel gave varying accounts of how he conceived of The Cat in the Hat. According to the story Geisel told most often, he was so frustrated with the word list that William Spaulding had given him that he finally decided to scan the list and create a story out of the first two words he found that rhymed. The words he found were cat and hat.[8] Near the end of his life, Geisel told his biographers, Judith and Neil Morgan, that he conceived the beginnings of the story while he was with Spaulding, in an elevator in the Houghton Mifflin offices in Boston.[9] It was an old, shuddering elevator and was operated by a "small, stooped woman wearing 'a leather half-glove and a secret smile'".[9] Anita Silvey, recounting a similar story, described the woman as "a very elegant, very petite African-American woman named Annie Williams".[10] Geisel told Silvey that, when he sketched the Cat in the Hat, he thought of Williams and gave the character Williams' white gloves and "sly, even foxy smile".[10]
Geisel gave two conflicting, partly fictionalized accounts of the book's creation in two articles, "How Orlo Got His Book" in The New York Times Book Review and "My Hassle with the First Grade Language" in the Chicago Tribune, both published on November 17, 1957.[8] In "My Hassle with the First Grade Language", he wrote about his proposal to a "distinguished schoolbook publisher" to write a book for young children about "scaling the peaks of Everest at 60 degrees below".[11] The publisher was intrigued but informed him that, because of the word list, "you can't use the word scaling. You can't use the word peaks. You can't use Everest. You can't use 60. You can't use degrees. You can't..."[11] Geisel gave a similar account to Robert Cahn for an article in the July 6, 1957, edition of The Saturday Evening Post.[8] In "My Hassle With the First Grade Language", he also told a story of the "three excruciatingly painful weeks" in which he worked on a story about a King Cat and a Queen Cat.[12] However, "queen" was not on the word list, nor did his first grade nephew, Norval, recognize it. So Geisel returned to the work, but could then think only of words that started with the letter "q", which did not appear in any word on the list. He then had a similar fascination with the letter "z", which also did not appear in any word on the list. When he did finally finish the book and showed it to his nephew, Norval had already graduated from the first grade and was learning calculus. Philip Nel notes, in his dissection of the article, that Norval was Geisel's invention. Geisel's niece, Peggy Owens, did have a son, but he was only a one-year-old when the article was published.[13]
In "How Orlo Got His Book", he described Orlo, a fictional, archetypal young child who was turned off of reading by the poor selection of simple reading material.[14] To save Orlo the frustration, Geisel decided to write a book for children like Orlo but found the task "not dissimilar to... being lost with a witch in a tunnel of love".[14] He tried to write a story called "The Queen Zebra" but found that both words did not appear on the list. In fact, like Geisel wrote in "My Hassle with the First Grade Language", the letters "q" and "z" did not appear on the list at all. He then tried to write a story about a bird, without using the word bird as it did not appear on the list. He decided to call it a "wing thing" instead, but struggled as he discovered that it "couldn't have legs or a beak or a tail. Neither a left foot or a right foot."[15] On his approach to writing The Cat in the Hat he wrote, "The method I used is the same method you use when you sit down to make apple stroodle [sic] without stroodles."[15] 041b061a72