THE CAT IN THE HAT

Theodor Seuss Geisel ’25 wrote The Cat in the Hat in response to a challenge to write a book using only a list of 348 words deemed important for first-graders to recognize. The book contains 236 of the words. This first trade edition, published by Random House in 1957, was an instant success, and more than 10 million copies—in 12 languages—have been sold since, making it one of the most recognizable from the Seuss canon. The prolific author, one of the College’s more favored sons, has sold more than 600 million books overall but never let his popularity go to his head. “My animals look the way they do because I never learned to draw,” he once admitted. In 1955 Dartmouth legitimized the “Dr.” in his pen name by awarding Geisel an honorary doctorate. And in 2012 Dartmouth renamed its medical school “The Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine.”