You have brains in your head...

My son has been learning to read lately, and I’ve found that Dr. Seuss books are a fun way to learn a lot of the shorter, simpler words. Theodor Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, has 60+ books that have sold over 600 million copies. He has penned the most popular children’s books of all time, and many of his made up words have found their way into my everyday vocabulary (I do indeed have a wocket in my pocket!).

I learned two things about Dr. Seuss that I wanted to share with you today. The first is how he got his nickname, and the second is why he wrote The Cat in the Hat.

While at Dartmouth College in the 1920s, Dr. Seuss was caught drinking gin. This was during Prohibition, and both possessing and consuming alcohol was illegal. The dean of the college insisted he resign from all extracurricular activities, which included work on a humor magazine called Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern. Dr. Seuss agreed, but later worked on the publication without the college’s knowledge, using the pen name “Seuss”. He then went on to enter Lincoln College, intending to earn a Ph.D., but dropped out to become an artist. In 1956, he earned an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth, legitimizing the Dr. title in his name.

In 1954, Life magazine put out a report claiming that the reason illiteracy existed among school children was due to the dullness of books at the time. William Spaulding, the director of education at Houghton Mifflin, created a list of about 350 words that he thought first-graders should recognize. He passed that list on to Dr. Seuss, asked him to cut it to 250 words, and told him to create a book that children would love using only those words. Nine months later, The Cat in the Hat was born, using 236 of the words, and retaining the style of his earlier works. Pretty neat, right?

-Reshma