Chapter 8

The Cat in the Hat Arrives

In 1954, an article appeared in Life, a popular weekly magazine. It asked why American children had so much trouble learning to read. Was it because books for beginning readers were so boring? Teachers thought children learned to read by seeing the same words over and over. So early readers used short, choppy sentences that just kept repeating the same thing. Why would smart children read these dull books? If someone like Dr. Seuss wrote an early reader, maybe children would actually want to read it.

A friend of Ted’s, William Spaulding, worked for the publisher Houghton Mifflin. He read the article and said to Ted, “Write me a story that first-graders can’t put down!” Ted was willing to try. Random House and Houghton Mifflin worked out an agreement. Houghton Mifflin would sell the book to schools and libraries, and Random House would sell it to bookstores.

William Spaulding gave Ted a list of about three hundred words that most first-graders should know. The book could only use about 225 words, and all of them had to come from this list. Ted thought it would be easy to toss off a little story—but he soon found out it was almost impossible. Every time he had an idea, he needed a word that wasn’t on the list. He spent more than a year trying and failing. Finally he decided, “I’ll read [the list] once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that will be my book.” He found them—cat and hat—and The Cat in the Hat was born.

The Cat in the Hat was published in 1957. Many teachers didn’t like it. They thought it looked too much like a comic book and it wasn’t serious. Some librarians hid it and hoped kids wouldn’t find it. Houghton Mifflin, which handled school and library sales, didn’t sell many copies.

But kids loved The Cat in the Hat. They read it and told their friends about it. Bookstores couldn’t keep it on the shelves. It just kept selling and never stopped. Within three years, it had sold over one million copies. Of everything he had ever written, Ted said, “It’s the book I’m proudest of . . .”

At Random House, Bennett Cerf’s wife, Phyllis, thought The Cat in the Hat should be just the beginning. She wanted to publish a whole series of books like it—books that used just a few words but were so much fun kids would actually want to read them. She convinced her husband to let her start a new company at Random House. It would be run by Phyllis, Ted, and Helen. Called Beginner Books, it would publish beginning readers by Dr. Seuss and also by other people.

Right away, Beginner Books was a hit. Random House became the nation’s largest publisher of children’s books. Ted was happy to publish books by old friends from his army days, like P. D. Eastman, who wrote Are You My Mother? and Go, Dog. Go! He also published a book by Marshall McClintock, the Vanguard editor who had given him his start years before. And he discovered books about a family of bears written by Stan and Jan Berenstain.

Bennett Cerf was amused by the word list Beginner Books authors had to use. If writing a book using only three hundred words was so hard, he asked, what about one with even fewer? He bet Ted fifty dollars that he couldn’t write a book using only fifty words. Bennett Cerf lost his bet. Ted wrote and illustrated Green Eggs and Ham using exactly fifty words. It remains the most popular of all his books and the fourth best-selling children’s book of all time.

THE BABY BOOM

BEGINNER BOOKS BEGAN AT THE BEST POSSIBLE TIME. AFTER WORLD WAR II, AMERICAN FAMILIES STARTED HAVING LOTS OF CHILDREN. BY 1957, THERE WERE MORE KIDS JUST LEARNING TO READ THAN EVER BEFORE. AT THE SAME TIME, THE UNITED STATES WAS MORE AND MORE AFRAID OF THE USSR, A GROUP OF COMMUNIST COUNTRIES. PEOPLE WERE WORRIED THAT SCHOOLS IN THESE COUNTRIES WERE BETTER AT TRAINING CHILDREN TO BECOME SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS. SO IN 1958, THE US GOVERNMENT BEGAN TO POUR MONEY INTO SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES. SOME OF THIS MONEY WAS USED TO BUY BOOKS LIKE DR. SEUSS’S BEGINNER BOOKS SERIES.