Use the limitation to create advantage - The Cat in the Hat moral
In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, William Ellsworth Spaulding, the director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin who later became its Chairman, compiled a list of 348 words he felt were important for first-graders to recognize and asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words. [ 31 ] Spaulding challenged Geisel to "bring back a book children can't put down." [ 32 ] Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat . It was described as a tour de force by some reviewers [ who? ] —it retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Geisel's earlier works, but because of its simplified vocabulary, it could be read by beginning readers. The Cat in the Hat and subsequent books written for young children a