The Cat in the Hat Turns 50
Tommy had a doughnut for his morning snack today. Tommy didn’t wash his hands after eating. Tommy’s hands are now covered in germs. Tommy is Typhoid Mary, and probably a Titoist too.
The standard run of children’s literature, in America’s dawning Cold War era, was pretty dull stuff, full of portent about what would happen to Tommy and Betty and Mommy and Daddy if such rituals as washing one’s hands in intervals befitting Howard Hughes were not observed. (For one thing, I suppose, the body snatchers would come.) And so it was that by 1954, social reformers were bemoaning a rising incidence of illiteracy in the nation—as well as another odd development, namely that children seemed to prefer television or radio to books.
The reason, ventured author John Hersey in a widely circulated article in Life, was that writing for the youngest tier of readers was plodding, pedantic, moralizing, and altogether stultifying, as well as “antiseptic” and, like Hughes’s hands, “unnaturally clean.” Moreover, it was governed by a soul-killing pedagogy that insisted that the boredom such reading induced was the only way children could be made to learn American values, prominent among them, one supposes, the ability to endure soul-killing without complaint. Coupled with this pedagogical program was a list of some 350 approved “new reader” vocabulary words deemed appropriate to first graders in all parts of the nation, on which the word “fun” surely ranked low if at all.
Enter Theodore Seuss Geisel, a children’s book author whose publisher stepped up to Hersey’s challenge to develop a book using 225 words from the list and not bore readers into submission in the bargain. In 1957, Geisel—far better known as Dr. Seuss—responded with The Cat in the Hat, a reading primer that had none of the numbing this-is-work spirit of other primers. Geisel cheated a touch by using 236 words, which may or may not be why school districts were so slow to adopt his book; published three years later and born of a bet, Green Eggs and Ham used only 50.
Young readers took The Cat in the Hat very much to heart, though. I know that I did, just a couple of years after it was published, and went on to read everything else Dr. Seuss ever wrote, work that prepared me for every other book that ever passed before my eyes.
The Cat in the Hat is now 50, and anyone who shares gratitude and affection for the creature and his creator should hasten to seussville.com to send him birthday greetings. For every card sent (up to a million and up to May 1, 2007), Random House promises to donate a book to First Book, a nationwide literacy effort. There could be no more fitting tribute to a great man—and, for that matter, a great cat.
Read entire article at Gregory McNamee at the Britannica Blog
The standard run of children’s literature, in America’s dawning Cold War era, was pretty dull stuff, full of portent about what would happen to Tommy and Betty and Mommy and Daddy if such rituals as washing one’s hands in intervals befitting Howard Hughes were not observed. (For one thing, I suppose, the body snatchers would come.) And so it was that by 1954, social reformers were bemoaning a rising incidence of illiteracy in the nation—as well as another odd development, namely that children seemed to prefer television or radio to books.
The reason, ventured author John Hersey in a widely circulated article in Life, was that writing for the youngest tier of readers was plodding, pedantic, moralizing, and altogether stultifying, as well as “antiseptic” and, like Hughes’s hands, “unnaturally clean.” Moreover, it was governed by a soul-killing pedagogy that insisted that the boredom such reading induced was the only way children could be made to learn American values, prominent among them, one supposes, the ability to endure soul-killing without complaint. Coupled with this pedagogical program was a list of some 350 approved “new reader” vocabulary words deemed appropriate to first graders in all parts of the nation, on which the word “fun” surely ranked low if at all.
Enter Theodore Seuss Geisel, a children’s book author whose publisher stepped up to Hersey’s challenge to develop a book using 225 words from the list and not bore readers into submission in the bargain. In 1957, Geisel—far better known as Dr. Seuss—responded with The Cat in the Hat, a reading primer that had none of the numbing this-is-work spirit of other primers. Geisel cheated a touch by using 236 words, which may or may not be why school districts were so slow to adopt his book; published three years later and born of a bet, Green Eggs and Ham used only 50.
Young readers took The Cat in the Hat very much to heart, though. I know that I did, just a couple of years after it was published, and went on to read everything else Dr. Seuss ever wrote, work that prepared me for every other book that ever passed before my eyes.
The Cat in the Hat is now 50, and anyone who shares gratitude and affection for the creature and his creator should hasten to seussville.com to send him birthday greetings. For every card sent (up to a million and up to May 1, 2007), Random House promises to donate a book to First Book, a nationwide literacy effort. There could be no more fitting tribute to a great man—and, for that matter, a great cat.