The Birth of a Famous Feline
An outrageous cat teaches a new generation to read
Greece had Zeus. America has Seuss. In the 50 years since The Cat in the Hat exploded onto the children's book scene, Theodor Seuss Geisel—pen name "Dr. Seuss"—has become a central character in the American literary mythology, sharing the pantheon with the likes of Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Of his many imaginative stories, The Cat in the Hat remains the most iconic.
The tale, of course, is about the irreverent cat who waltzes uninvited into a house where two children have been left alone for the day and proceeds to violate every tenet of their mother's commandments. It came at a time when children's literature was largely dominated by Aesop's fables and other stories with explicit morals—lessons that the cat flouts with zeal. "It was extremely radical when it came out," says Prof. Eliza Dresang of Florida State University, who studies children's literature. "At the end of the '50s, we were on the verge of lots of radical things happening in society. In that way, maybe people were more able to accept it."
236 words. Geisel had been publishing children's books for 20 years when Cat was published in March 1957; early titles included the classic Horton Hears a Who! The particular endurance of Cat, many critics say, is owed partly to its origins in an emerging philosophy of phonetic learning. Most of the 236 individual words in the book were taken from a list of beginner words for new readers, and only a few are more than one syllable. The "anapestic" meter—two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable—marks out a cadence that is easy for young readers to grasp. Using this model, Geisel and partners would go on to found a whole series called Beginner Books. "When you're reading aloud, you can just feel what's supposed to come next," says Joyce Herbeck, an education professor at Montana State University. "It makes them feel like readers right away."
The Cat in the Hat is not bereft of morals; it's just that no one seems to agree on what they are. Many scholars find political themes—for example, seeing the Cat, with his tall red-and-white hat, as a perverse parody of Uncle Sam.
Geisel, who died in 1991, remained coy on the subject. In a 1986 interview with U.S. News, he said: "[W]hen you write a kid's book, somebody's got to win. You find yourself preaching in spite of yourself. But sometimes people find morals where there are none."
It is, after all, a great mystery of The Cat in the Hat: Children seem to understand it so much better than adults.
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