Top 100 Picture Books #36: The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss

#36 The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss (1957)
50 points
Adore the story and it brought reading to an access level for beginning readers. – Mary Friedrichs
The poor cat didn’t make it onto the list last time because I wasn’t including easy readers.  Now he bursts onto the scene, hat askew, intentions questionable, lovable to his core.  Recently he’s been turned into an animated serious on television.  He’s appearing in countless easy nonfiction books.  He’s even slated for a new movie (see: the end of this post).
The plot as described by Anita Silvey’s 100 Best Books for Children reads, “The cat arrives one day to entertain two young children.  As the rhyme spins out of control, so do the antics of the mayhem-making cat, and chaos ensues.  But before Mother returns, the cat cleans up everything, leaving the children to ponder whether or not to tell her what happened.”
In terms of its creation, one of the best explanations I’ve found actually came from Cracked.com in an article discussing how Dr. Seuss had a tendency to write books as responses to dares.  As they so eloquently put it, “It started with a 1955 article by William Spaulding of Houghton Mifflin, called ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’. Instead of taking the easy route (‘Because Johnny is stupid.’) Spaulding analyzed the state of reading material for young children and found it insufferably boring. Not only did nobody care about Dick and Jane throwing a ball, least of all small children with short attention spans, but the choice of words was haphazard – throwing in anything with one or two syllables instead of deliberately coming up with the most useful words to help kids learn. Spaulding hooked up with Seuss and challenged him with the novel idea of writing a book with an actual story kids would want to read. If that wasn’t crazy enough, he asked him to use a list of 300 words that they had come up with, targeted toward helping kids practice phonics. Seuss thought this was insane and was attempting to politely back out of it when he glanced at the list one more time and decided he’d make a title out of the first two rhyming words he saw. They were “cat” and “hat”. Nine months of frustrating work later, he had a book that was 1702 words long with only 220 unique words, telling an interesting story, introducing an unforgettable character, and completely written in anapestic dimeter.”
According to Silvey it wasn’t until the bookstore edition was published that the title made any waves at all.  Once it was discovered it managed to sell a MILLION copies in three years.
As I may have mentioned before, I’m a sucker for a good statue.  This pairing from the Dr. Seuss National Memorial at The Quadrangle in Springfield, Massachusetts fulfills my every need. So cool.

In 1971 they turned it into an animated film.  It’s a bit long but this doggone song, THIS DOGGONE SONG, will simply not leave my brain.  The ultimate earworm.  Watch it at your own risk.

I will spare you the horrendous produce-placement-strewn Mike Myers fiasco.  Are you happy or sad to hear they’re going to try it again?

Filed under: Best Books, Top 100 Picture Books Poll