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A new animated The Cat in the Hat opens in theatres today, November 6, with Bill Hader voicing the Cat. The original book behind it has a backstory that sounds invented.
In the 1950s, worry spread that kids found their reading primers dull. Books like Dick and Jane were considered too boring to teach children to read, and publishers wanted something better.
William Spaulding, then director of Houghton Mifflin's educational division, handed Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, a vocabulary list built for 6- and 7-year-olds. The job: write a story kids would actually want to read.
Geisel found the task miserable. By his most-told account, he got so frustrated that he scanned the list and picked the first two words he found that rhymed.
Those two words were "cat" and "hat." An entire children's classic grew out of a rhyme pulled from a school word list, and the Cat's famous stovepipe hat followed.
The finished book uses just 236 different words. Sources disagree on the exact limit he was given, but Biography.com says he went over it, so he didn't technically pull off the challenge.
Even the rhyme story is Seuss's own telling. Wikipedia notes he later gave a different account, saying the idea began in an elevator at Houghton Mifflin with Spaulding.
