The August 13, 2007, issue of U.S. News & World Report declared 1957 to be “A Year That Changed America.” The article focused on ten disparate events. Among them were the Cold War Soviet launch of Sputnik, setting off the race for space; the Dodgers and Giants both deserting New York for California, bringing big-time baseball and world attention to the West Coast; growing racial tensions hitting their peak in Little Rock; the introduction of the birth control pill; and a former ad man, Dr. Seuss, revolutionizing the way that children learned to read.
U.S. News began the Seuss segment, The Birth of a Famous Feline, with this accolade, “Greece had Zeus—America has Seuss,” and continued in part, “In the 50 years since The Cat in the Hat exploded onto the children’s book scene, Theodor Seuss Geisel 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.”
Ted Geisel had been writing children’s books for twenty years when The Cat in the Hat first stepped into our lives and onto the world stage in 1957, literally supercharging his career. Geisel’s quirky Cat put him on the fast track to becoming a force in children’s literacy due in part to the book’s origins in an emerging philosophy of phonetic learning. Not only was the vocabulary largely taken from a list of 220 beginner’s words but Ted crafted the story in anapestic tetrameter, marking out a cadence that was easy for young readers to grasp. Using this model, Ted, Helen, to whom he would be married for forty years, and Phyllis Cerf, the wife of the Random House president Bennett Cerf, would go on to found Beginner Books at Random House.
All information excerpted from: Secrets of the Deep, the Lost, Forgotten, and Hidden Works of Theodor Seuss Geisel and The Cat Behind the Hat