3727. The Cat in the Hat

The Cat in the Hat is a children's book by Dr. Seuss. It features a tall, anthropomorphic, mischievous cat, wearing a tall, red and white-striped hat and a red bow tie. With the series of Beginner Books that The Cat inaugurated, Seuss promoted both his name and the cause of elementary literacy in the United States of America. The Cat in the Hat (1957) is the first book featuring the title character. In it the Cat brings a cheerful, exotic and exuberant form of chaos to a household of two young kids, brother and sister, one rainy day while their mother leaves them unattended. The Cat performs all sorts of wacky tricks—the Cat at one point balances a teacup, some milk, a cake, three books, the Fish, a rake, a toy boat, a toy man, a red fan, and his umbrella while he's on a ball to the chagrin of the fish—to amuse the children, with mixed results. Then, the Cat gets a box from outside. Inside the box are two creatures named Thing One and Thing Two, who begin to fly kites in the house. The Cat's antics are vainly opposed by the family pet, a sapient and articulate fish. The children (Sally and her unnamed older brother, who serves as the narrator) ultimately prove exemplary latchkey children, capturing the Things with a net and bringing the Cat under control. To make up for the chaos he has caused, he cleans up the house on his way out, disappearing a second before the mother arrives. The mother asks what they did while she was out, but it is not revealed whether or not they tell her - the story ends with the question, 'What would you do if your mother asked you?' The book has been popular since its publication, and a logo featuring the Cat adorns all Dr. Seuss publications and animated films produced after The Cat in the Hat. Seuss wrote the book because he felt that there should be more entertaining and fun material for beginning readers. From a literary point of view, the book is a feat of skill, since it keeps to a tiny vocabulary and tells an entertaining tale. Literary critics occasionally write recreational essays about the work, having fun with issues such as the absence of the mother and the psychological or symbolic characterizations of Cat, Things, and Fish. This book is written with short lines in anapestic dimeter—half the length of the lines in Yertle the Turtle (see Dr. Seuss's meters). More than 11 million copies of The Cat in the Hat have been printed. It has been translated into more than 12 different languages.[3][4] In particular, it has been translated into Latin with the title Cattus Petasatus and into Yiddish with the title "di Kats der Payats".

3674. Cat in the Hat

The Cat in the Hat is a children's book by Dr. Seuss. It features a tall, anthropomorphic, mischievous cat, wearing a tall, red and white-striped hat and a red bow tie. With the series of Beginner Books that The Cat inaugurated, Seuss promoted both his name and the cause of elementary literacy in the United States of America. Theodor Geisel, writing as Dr. Seuss, created The Cat in the Hat in response to the May 24, 1954, Life magazine article by John Hersey, titled "Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading." In the article, Hersey was critical of school primers: In the classroom boys and girls are confronted with six books that have insipid illustrations depicting the slicked-up lives of other children. [Existing primers] feature abnormally courteous, unnaturally clean boys and girls. . . . In bookstores, anyone can buy brighter, livelier books featuring strange and wonderful animals and children who behave naturally, i.e., sometimes misbehave. Given incentive from school boards, publishers could do as well with primers. Hersey’s arguments were enumerated over ten pages of Life magazine, which was a leading periodical in the U.S. at that time. After detailing many issues contributing to the dilemma connected with student reading levels, Hersey asked toward the end of the article: Why should [school primers] not have pictures that widen rather than narrow the associative richness the children give to the words they illustrate — drawings like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children’s illustrators, Tenniel, Howard Pyle, "Seuss", Walt Disney? A 2003 White House Christmas decoration using "The Cat in the Hat" as the theme. Ted Geisel's friend William Ellsworth Spaulding, who was then the director of Houghton Mifflin's education division, invited Geisel to dinner in Boston and "proposed that Ted write and illustrate such a book for six- and seven-year olds who had already mastered the basic mechanics of reading. 'Write me a story that first-graders can't put down!" [Spaulding] challenged." Spaulding supplied Geisel with a list of 348 words that every six year old should know, and insisted that the book's vocabulary be limited to 225 words. Nine months later Dr. Seuss finished The Cat in the Hat, which used 223 words that appeared on the list plus 13 words that did not. Because Geisel was under contract with Random House, Houghton Mifflin retained the school rights to The Cat in the Hat and Random House retained the rights to trade sales. The story is 1629 words in length and uses a vocabulary of only 236 distinct words, of which 54 occur once and 33 twice. Only a single word – another – has three syllables, while 14 have two and the remaining 221 are monosyllabic. The longest words are something and playthings. In an interview he gave in Arizona magazine in June 1981, Dr. Seuss claimed the book took nine months to complete due to the difficulty in writing a book from the 223 selected words. He added that the title for the book came from his desire to have the title rhyme and the first two suitable rhyming words that he could find from the list were "cat" and "hat". Dr. Seuss also regretted the association of his book and the "look say" reading method adopted during the Dewey revolt in the 1920s. He expressed the opinion that "... killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country.

3371. Sam I Am and Friend

Green Eggs and Ham is a best-selling and critically acclaimed book by Dr. Seuss (a pen-name of Theodor Seuss Geisel), first published on August 12, 1960. As of 2001, according to Publishers Weekly, it was the fourth-best-selling English-language children's book (novel) of all time.

A character known as "Sam I Am" pesters another character to taste the bizarre-looking titular dish. He declines, claiming to dislike the delicacy in question. However, the persistent Sam I Am will not cease following him around and trying to encourage him to try the green eggs and ham, asking him if he will sample the dish if he does it in various locations (like a boat or a house) and with an assortment of dining partners (like a goat or a mouse). At the end, the disgruntled character gives in to the nonstop nagging of Sam I Am and tires a bite of green eggs and ham, which he finds he does indeed like.

Green Eggs and Ham is one of Seuss's "Beginner Books", written in a very simple vocabulary for beginning readers.
The vocabulary of the text consists of just fifty different words and was the result of a bet between Seuss and Bennett Cerf (Dr. Seuss's publisher) that Seuss (after completing The Cat in the Hat using 225 words) could not complete an entire book using so few words.
The 50 are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

Green Eggs and Ham was first published on August 12, 1960, and became the fourth-best selling English-language children's hardcover book of all time. In 1999, the National Education Association conducted an online survey of children and teachers, seeking the 100 most popular children's books. On both the children's and the teachers' lists, Green Eggs and Ham was ranked third, just above another Dr. Seuss book, The Cat in the Hat.

3341. The Foot Book bear

The Foot Book: Dr. Seuss's Wacky Book of Opposites (ISBN 0-394-80937-8) is a children's book written by Dr. Seuss and first published in 1968.

The Foot Book is intended for young children, and it seeks to convey the concept of opposites through depictions of different kinds of feet. The text of The Foot Book is highly stylized, containing the rhymes, repetitions, and cadences typical of Dr. Seuss's work. Reading this book will teach the reader that you should not judge any one because of what they look like or in this case their feet.

The Foot Book is Seuss's first in the Bright and Early Books series, intended for children too young for books in the Beginner Books series. It was also his first book after the death of his wife Helen Palmer Geisel, and Seuss put in eight-hour days working on it as a way of coping with his loss. The Foot Book was extremely successful, and as of 1997, it was in its 52nd reprinting.

Like many Dr. Seuss books, The Foot Book has inspired others. Big Brother Mouse, a publishing project in Laos, drew on The Foot Book to develop Baby Frog, Baby Monkey, a book for very young readers that uses rhymes, repetition, and the pairing of opposite words.