in 1939, at the age of thirty-five, theodor seuss geisel was toying with an invention that was doomed to fail. Geisel had published a few books under the name Dr. Seuss, but he was hopeful that a device he had patented, the infantograph, would be a moneymaker at the New York Techno-Utopian World’s Fair opening that year. “If you married the person you’re with,” asked the banner Geisel designed for his pavilion, “what would your children be like? Come in and have your infantography taken!” in the store, a couple sat next to each other; a dual-lens camera would combine their features, then layer a composite mug shot over an image of a baby’s body. “It was a wonderful idea,” Geisel insisted, but, as a feat of engineering, it was more an evocation of quirky, off-kilter Seussian machinery than a working prototype. After much fiddling, he scrapped his plans and admitted that “all babies tended to look like William Randolph Hearst.”
in “becoming dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination,” a new biography by Brian Jay Jones, this anecdote is played primarily for laughs. But the momentum behind the Geisel device is indicative of deeper concerns. Ever since John Locke articulated his thoughts on education, we have wondered what to project onto the blank slate of a child’s mind, recalling the philosopher’s advice that “the small and almost insensible impressions in our early childhood have far-reaching consequences.” and lasting”. .” As Geisel grew up in his role as Dr. Seuss, a beloved children’s author, came to represent a distinctively American re-imagining of these reflections on childhood. As the media landscape changed and expanded throughout his life, Geisel eventually came to recognize the vital role of children’s literature. “Children’s reading and thinking are the fundamental foundation on which this country will rise. or not to go up ”, he asserted in an editorial, from 1960, in the Los Angeles times. “In these days of tension and confusion. . . children’s books have more potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.”
the road to that realization was long, full of accidents and detours. the genius of dr. Seuss was the product of a personal and artistic evolution that spanned every decade of the American century, and Geisel would not fully embrace his profession or achieve his most significant triumphs until middle age and beyond. he began his career as a day laborer, providing caricatures and illustrations for other people’s magazines, advertisements, and books. although advertising work was lucrative, he would soon seek more meaningful creative outlets, including writing for children. “I would like to say that I got into children’s books because I had a burning passion, a great message to take to the youth of the world,” he told an interviewer late in his life, “but it was because it was driving me crazy. As World War II loomed, Geisel also turned to political cartooning, criticizing the pro-fascist and anti-Semitic isolationism of Charles Lindbergh and Father Toughlin. After the United States entered the war, he joined the Army Signal Corps and created propaganda films under the supervision of Frank Capra. For a brief period after the war, Hollywood lured him in, but Geisel’s few film projects that did come to fruition were disappointing to disastrous.
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Throughout this period, Geisel published over a dozen children’s books under the name Dr. Seuss, ranging from the first, “And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street,” in 1937, to “If The Circus Ran,” in 1956, which were generally met with rave reviews but middling to decent sales. during the first two decades of his career, dr. seuss was not a household name. But, as the baby boom was reaching its peak and Sputnik was causing many concerns about the state of American education, a vigorous debate over literacy was beginning to take shape, and Geisel found himself thrust into the forefront of the battle.
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for decades, school teachers had been parking their youngest students in front of basic readers or primers, exemplified by the dick and jane series. the pedagogical approach underlying these manuals assumed that beginning readers learned new words best by associating them with pictures and memorizing them through obedient repetition. By the mid-1950s, this “whole word” or “look and say” method was only just beginning to face pushback from advocates of phonics-based instruction, most visibly in Rudolf Flesch’s influential polemic “Why Johnny can’t read. ”
It didn’t help that Dick and Jane belonged to what many have called the world’s most boring family. the books were plotless, filled with almost repetitive, mind-numbing sentences. (“look, jane. look, look. look dick. look, look. oh, look. look dick.”) the illustrations were heavy and bland. Flesch considered the series “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless”. Author John Hersey, in an article on the literacy debate for Life magazine, wasn’t much kinder, calling the books “silly” and “insipid” and the images “terribly literal.” hersey wondered why primers couldn’t at least feature the talent of talented children’s book illustrators, and listed dr. seuss among the ranks of him.
The head of houghton mifflin’s education division took note. He challenged Geisel to write a primer that emerging or reluctant readers would actually enjoy, pleading, “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down!” but for a wordsmith as playful and unconventional as dr. Seuss, someone fond of phrases like “howling mad hullaballoo,” who invented animals like the yuzz-a-ma-tuzz, there was one big problem: To qualify as a first-grade manual, the text would have to be strictly restricted. to a list of three hundred and fifty simple, pre-approved vocabulary words provided by the publisher, with a preferential limit of only two hundred and twenty-five words. could dr Seuss delivered a page turner containing no more than two hundred and twenty-five actual words, in English, mostly monosyllabic?
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geisel agreed to give it a try. for months, she pored over the list of words, sometimes moaning and writhing on the couch, waiting for inspiration. According to one account, Ella Geisel “finally gave it one more chance and said, ‘If I find two words that rhyme and make sense to me, that’s the title.'” He was about to give up when “cat” and “hat” caught his eye. Several more months of excruciating writing and rewriting followed, as he extracted a coherent story from the restrictive list of words. (His editor, Saxe Commins, who Having worked with the likes of Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner, he took the project as seriously as adult literature: “I would spend an hour talking about three or four lines,” Geisel recalled.) When Geisel went to turn in the final manuscript of ” the cat in the hat,” jones writes, “knew he had something new and very different on his hands.”
In Jones’s summary, “with its likeable and somewhat subversive main character, galloping verse and deliberate sense of humor, ‘The Cat in the Hat’ was everything ‘Dick and Jane’ was not.” And yet Geisel hadn’t exactly flouted the prevailing pedagogical approach; she had turned some of his faults into merits. the stultifying repetitions of the typical primer had been replaced by cheerfully musical ones. Some of the cat’s more comically absurd escapades are entirely consistent with the look-and-tell method, minus the terrible literalness that Hersey denounced. what child has not marveled at the books, the cup, the cake, the rake, the toy boat, the toy man, the red fan, the fish, and the milk on a plate (all taken from that list of words ) while teetering on the cat’s limbs? on the other hand, with her reliance on memorable rhyming pairs and word families, “The Cat in the Hat,” beginning with its catchy title, accentuated for early readers how sound and symbol correspond. the book served as a gateway to the phonics-based approach, which eventually replaced whole-word pedagogy.
In addition to sparking a revolution in the teaching of reading, “The Cat in the Hat” was an immediate commercial sensation. “By some accounts,” Jones writes, “‘The Cat in the Hat’ was selling more than a thousand copies a day, on track to sell 250,000 copies by Christmas 1957, and more than three million copies in three years.”
the success of the book eventually became dr. seuss in a day job for geisel. Confident of the value of children’s literature, Geisel worked tirelessly for the next three decades. With the demand for well-crafted alternatives to traditional manuals established, she expanded her role and co-founded the publisher of books for beginners. she worked with a talented roster of children’s authors and illustrators, and published some of her most memorable work, which was specifically for the younger segment of her audience. “Hop on Pop”, “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish” and “Green Egg and Ham”, which was born out of a bet that Geisel couldn’t reduce her vocabulary to just fifty unique words, were released. by books for beginners.
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