Seuss imagined his now famous story like so: Two kids are stuck at home alone on a rainy day. With the word list being so limited, he finally - out of frustration - chose the first two words he could find that rhymed and decided to create a story around them. In the end, he managed to keep his masterpiece, The Cat in the Hat, to 236 words.īut conceiving the story was hard for Dr. Accustomed to inventing words at his leisure in his previous books, the imaginative author underestimated how difficult it would be to limit his vocabulary to around 200 words, give or take. But in fact, he did sweat - for a year and a half. 'Write me a story that first-graders can't put down!' he repeatedly exclaimed to Dr. Seuss over for dinner and asked him to create an exciting children's book that would encourage them to read. Upon reading the article, William Spaulding, the director of Houghton Mifflin's education division, decided to take Hershey's idea to the next level. Hershey added: 'Why should not have pictures that widen rather than narrow the associative richness the children give to the words they illustrate - drawings like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children's illustrators, Tenniel, Howard Pyle, 'Dr. Given incentive from school boards, publishers could do as well with primers.' In bookstores anyone can buy brighter, livelier books featuring strange and wonderful animals and children who behave naturally, i.e., sometimes misbehave. All feature abnormally courteous, unnaturally clean boys and girls. 'In the classroom boys and girls are confronted with books that have insipid illustrations depicting the slicked-up lives of other children. Writer John Hershey delineated the problem in a 1954 article in Life magazine:

Consequently, these boring characters impeded children from learning how to read and advance their skill level. The problem: Dick and Jane were boring, and educators and parents knew it. Seuss (real name: Theodor Geisel) was working as a children's book author and illustrator, a popular primer for young children involved the story of two characters named Dick and Jane.

Cat in the hat book