What a week for cake and candles! Longfellow turned 200. Elizabeth Taylor turned 75 – whatever happened to National Velvet, anyway? And today the Cat in the Hat turns 50. If you’re a child of a certain age (and who isn’t?), you will hear one of the Cat’s catchy rhymes, then long-forgotten neural pathways will be firing all day long. The same warning goes for the Cat’s animated musical birthday card. I was thrilled to find it, then I couldn’t turn it off.
As you’d expect for any 50-something cultural icon these days, the Cat in the Hat has his own Wikipedia page. But who knew the book has a scholarly edition, The Annotated Cat? According to the publisher’s blurb, “The Cat in the Hat and its sequel operate on many levels. The books teach reading, but they also teach about poetry, politics, ethics, comics, history… even conartistry.”
NPR celebrated this morning in its comprehensive audio-historical way. The NPR web page is loaded with additional content and links to other sources. Here’s the skinny:
John Hersey of Hiroshima fame had a hand in the book’s inspiration. He prompted publisher William Spalding to bring out an engaging children’s book that would solve the urgent question of the day, “Why can’t Johnny read?” That was the 1950s version of a pedagogical crisis as old as Socrates. The publisher asked Dr. Seuss to produce a reading primer with a 200-word vocabulary that was entertaining enough to replace Dick and Jane. Dr. Seuss chaffed at the word restrictions. The book took a year and a half to write, and in the end it deployed a 236-word vocabulary. It made Dr. Seuss a rock star among children’s authors, but it was too “subversive” to gain acceptance as a school primer. Like the Cat himself, Dr. Seuss knew how to break the rules and get away with it.
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