Dr. Seuss Day

What the day is

Dr. Seuss Day is observed on March 2, the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel, born in Massachusetts in 1904. It is also the date of an American reading initiative built around him.

Origin and background

The Cat in the Hat exists because of a magazine article. In 1954 a piece in Life argued that children were failing to learn to read partly because school primers were so lifeless that nobody wanted to open them. Geisel's publisher handed him a list of a few hundred words a first-grader should know and asked him to write something using only those. He produced a book drawing on 236 distinct words, and it worked well enough to reshape early reading books generally.

Green Eggs and Ham came from a wager with his publisher Bennett Cerf that he could not write a book using fifty different words or fewer. He used exactly fifty, and it became one of the best-selling children's books ever printed. Both cases point the same way: the constraint produced the invention rather than limiting it.

The name is two jokes. Seuss was his middle name and his mother's maiden name, originally pronounced closer to voice than to goose, and the doctorate was invented, since he left Oxford without finishing one.

The rhythm is the other half of why the books read aloud so well. He wrote largely in anapestic meter, the galloping pattern of two light beats and a heavy one, which pulls a reader forward and is very hard to read flatly.

In 2021 the company managing his estate stopped publishing six of his lesser-known titles containing racist caricatures. That was the rights holder's own decision rather than a ban, which is frequently misreported.

How to take part

• Read one aloud and let the meter carry you. That is what it was built for.
• Count the distinct words in Green Eggs and Ham. There really are fifty.
• Give a beginning reader a book rather than recommending one.
• Try writing something under a word restriction and see what it forces.
• Read the 1954 argument about primers, which started the whole thing.