>> and a professor at dartmouth university recounts the life of theodor seuss geisel, also known as dr. seuss. the author details kiesel's childhood in springfield, massachusetts, and the development of the dr. seuss persona at dartmouth university student newspaper, the jack-o'-lantern. norwich bookstore in norwich, vermont, host this hour-long talk. >> i want to begin by saying i am delighted that c-span can film an event within the norwich bookstore, which is a valued dimension of the upper valley. and like many local bookstores does not have the opportunity for the kind of national viewing that all local bookstores, especially at his side, should have. i also want to say that it's an honor for me to follow yesterday's presentation, cook

annual lecture, which bill was acknowledged not only by the wonderful talk, but because of a book he co-authored with james tatum, the dartmouth classics department on african-american writing and the classical tradition. it's a wonderful book, and the book is also available in the bookstore. i want to begin by asking the members of the audience, how many of you as children had dr. seuss read to you? let me see a show of hands. a good one half. none of us are too old. and how many of you read dr. seuss to your children? almost everyone. dr. seuss is a transgenerational author. he's an author who doesn't just address the children. he addresses the child that never dies and every adult.

but when i turn to the daunting task of trying to take hold of the figure who became dr. seuss, i was confronted with a career that had so many different aspects. it was difficult to come up with a line that would begin to do justice to the multiple facets of dr. seuss. and at the same time, give a powerful explanation of what i considered missing from every previous account of dr. seuss' work. what i found amazing was the account of the interrelationship between dr. seuss' art and theater kiesel's life. but as i was to discover in my research on dr. seuss, there is an intimate connection between

geisel's life and the sources, not only of dr. seuss' creation for children, but the sources in theodor geisel's life that enabled him to get through some of the most terrible impasses in that life. and like many great children's literature, offers, ted geisel new something in childhood that had to be returned and worked through before the child in the adult could feel sufficiently empowered, to lead children through writing into adulthood. so, tonight i'm going to try to explain the multiple dimensions of dr. seuss' literary career by

linking them to specific transitions in the life of theodor geisel. and for those of you who know anything about theodor geisel's career, you will know that he is not only a figure who was well known as the figure responsible for the authoring of dr. seuss' children's books, ted geisel was a remarkable famous advertising man in new york. he was the director, producer, and script writer of two oscar-winning films, know your enemy in germany, know your enemy in japan. he created a wonderful animated cartoon figure gerald mc boing boing. during world war ii he worked with frank, imagined relationship. franky capper, probably the figure who has most to do with maintaining what could be called adult children fantasy.

the films that he creates and dr. seuss working together in what was called fort fox to produce propaganda that would enable the united states to go into world war ii against ted geisel's ancestral hand -- homeland, germany. and produce what geisel understood to be the crucial distinction between what he understood to be the deep value of germany and the german people, antiauthoritarian spectra that have cast a dark shadow, not only over germany but over all of europe. he created with frank capra, a figure called private snafu, which is an acronym for situation normal all fouled up.

and that figure became a figure who educated soldiers throughout europe and have to deal with malaria, how to deal with problems that i won't mention to this audience for fear -- but in any case, real problems that soldiers new on the battlefield and off it. and ted geisel was also a figure who wrote comic strips, editorials, produced lectures on children's literature. that became world-famous. so how do all of those disparate facets come together as a singular persona, dr. seuss? let me explain that in trying to do justice to that already elaborate set of differentiated features of dr. seuss, i was

confronted with a restriction by oxford university press. when they asked me to write this book on theodor seuss geisel, they had two qualifications. they said you have to write his life into than 156 pages, and you have to write for an audience between eight years old and 95 years old. when i explained this to a dear colleague, bill cooke, he looked at me and said, you can't write a sentence in fewer than three pages. [laughter] and a less kind colleague said yes, and if an eight year old were to read that since you feel like he was 95. [laughter] so i knew my work was cut out for me. so i decided to turn the book into a series of chapters, five in all, that were structured around transitions in the life of theodor geisel.

and those transitions i felt would not only address the transformation of geisel, ted, the adult, geisel, dr. seuss, but would also pull in a dark secret. when dr. seuss created artworks, he said he never knew what the end would be. and he never quite knew what the beginning would be. he said that all of his artwork should be understood as an art of transition. he began with an image that had difficulty moving to the next image. so that all of the artistic power of dr. seuss was elicited by having to find the artistic passage that would link the impasse to a beginning and an end that would make that passage feel simultaneously as if it

were worth traveling, and as if it would also create in the travel a sense of deep gratification. for the reader. and for the writer. so the book begins with theodor geisel and his wife, helen, who was for 40 years the primary collaborator in everything he did. after he met her at oxford in 1926, and she looked over his shoulder and saw that while he was supposed to be learning john milton's paradise lost, he was instead creating figures on his margins, which included cows with wings and sagging gutters, and attack them on the shoulder upon seeing what he was creating in his noodles and said, ted,

ted, you don't want to be an english professor. what you would want to be is an artist who creates flying cows. he felt affirmed. he felt as if she had called him into a vocation, that he began to feel most urgently in that 1936 passage, back from germany on the s. as with helen, when the storm broke out at sea, and ted, born march 2, 1904, in springfield, massachusetts, had known of the titanic and the lusitania, and known of disasters on luxury ocean

liners, that that storm at sea awakened memories of. so he began to come as a kind of magical thinking, created a children's book, the sound of whose rhyme and rhythm matched the boom, boom of the engines of the ship's engine. the book took him back to his childhood. in springfield, massachusetts. specifically, childhood in which he was having trouble in the passage from his home he was the grandson of german immigrants to his school. in 1914 when first world war broke out. and ted geisel, who prior to that moment had been

acknowledged as a scion of the greatest brewery in springfield, massachusetts, started by his grandfather not as the combat and geisel brewer. classic colic come back and guzzle brewery. instead of being acknowledged by a thing that made him feel affirmed, every time his grandfather's clydesdale horses would take a black carriage with gold trim down mulberry street in springfield, he felt he was part of a springfield parade in which he was endlessly celebrated and acknowledged. it is difficult passage between germany and new york city, he returned to childhood memories in which the passage between home and school required him to

recover relation to resources in himself, that enabled him to traverse the passage by recovering relation to a dimension of his childhood self. that he had begun to know when his mother, henrietta seuss geisel, when he was a boy read him ryan to german stories, and sing him a nursery rhymes. and low him to sleep. theodor seuss geisel returned to his experience of henrietta seuss, in order to get back from

a germany that was beginning to become the bully that had become first in world war i in order to retrieve by way of that reconnection, a dimension of sound and image, that was for him only security, and only true belonging. when he used to come home from springfield is due as a little boy, and he would put noodles on his bedroom wall, plaster of his bedroom wall, that he would then add words to that turned the mispronunciation of german words into the pleasure of a nonsense sound that would make henrietta and his sister, marty, laugh. he understood those noodles on

the wall to be what he called guardian images, that were like his stuff dog that he kept with him from the age of eight to the age he died, and 87 year-old, september 24. because he felt that transitional object, like linus' blanket, was the prototype for all of his childhood images, all of his noodles were transitional objects that allowed the figure who created them to go through a passage of separation, transformed into the pleasure of belonging to the figure who mattered to him most. ..

>> then he said no. one day those images will be valuable. sure enough, in springfield, 74 fairfield street when theodore geisel revisited 50 years later, he asked a little boy who lived there then to pull up the wallpaper. there were the noodles. still there. and that real estate really got valuable as a consequence. when ted geisel created and to

think that i sought on mulberry street coming home from germany, he was obtaining a passage home from school in the face of school children who would throw brick bats at him and pelt him with stones while they screamed let's kill the kaiser's kid. ted geisel who would become dr. seuss had a remarkable childhood in which prosperity and total disgrace oscillated. back and forth. within his own family. as the son of and grandson of the heirs of the geisel brewery, he was acknowledged as one of the most prosperous members of the springfield community as the child of german immigrants.

he was a sign of what threatened that community. in 1918, when he was 14 years old, his grandfather, theodore geisel decided that he would put an end to the suspicious of the geisel family once and for all by purchasing $1,000 of liberty box and buying united states army tanks and horses for the calvary, and ted was encouraged to take his grandfather's purchase and turn it into a series of related purchases. up and down mulberry street. he sold so many liberty bombs as did the other major let's call them citizen scouts of springfield, that theodore

roosevelt caught wind of it. and decided to come to springfield's municipal auditorium in 1918 and pin blue medals on the lapels of everyone of the springfield's sales boys. and theodore geisel and the entire geisel family felt this would be the occasion in which they would recover their name and recover their dignity. theodore roosevelt, who's kind of a cartoonist dream, he looked like the big heart the moose, without the heart, he has the massive figure and chest and the need to project a voice that resonated so fully that every other voice feels as if it's both been consumed and drowned out. he awarded each boy a blue ribbon. and he had blue ribbons and

honorriffic phrases. until he came to the last boy who sold the most liberty bonds. for some reason theodore roosevelt had no blue ribbon for theodore geisel who was up this high up. and theodore roosevelt looked down at theodore geisel and said in that voice, who are you, little boy? and what are you doing here? after which the scout master whisked theodore off of the stage. theodore years later would say i felt like a pair of empty pants. the title of one of his stories. and he said that who that made me feel like nobody was the beginning of the creation of all of the whos in whoville.

when theodore geisel tried to deal with that targeted aggression, he began to develop the artistic strategies by means of which aggression directed at you, yet turned into what could be called your resource. satire, invective, parody, are means of taking the aggression that you feel might otherwise be directed at your person. and redirect by imagining images and language that enables you to control the aggression that would otherwise humiliate you. in high school, theodore geisel was known as the class whit and the class artist because of images and satires that turned

all of the experience issue losses of the passage back and forth from school into imaginative games. the gain of the imaginative is what enables you to turn what brings you to the verge of dispair. you know the power to translate it, transform it into a language and image imaginary of art. that takes you out of your depression. takes you out of your humiliation, and at the same time, gives pleasure to your reader. in 1920 with the passage of the volstead act, the disintegration of the nuclear name, the geisels, was completed. they lost their brewery.

and the german extented family now also in ruins. so in 1921, when theodore geisel left the second of the places in the talk thus far, springfield, and traveled on the train white river junction, he was looking for a family. and dartmouth became not a metaphorical family, it became the family that freud refers to when he describes what's called a family romance. it was a second world for him. a world elsewhere in which everything that had been torn apart in his first world, his sense of secure belonging, his sense that his person had been acknowledged, his sense that he would be able to move freely from place to place, all of

those senses were gratified when he after his first experience of a dartmouth class meeting, showed his classmates who he was. the images that you have, i passed out. look at the first of them. it's an image that theodore geisel produced during a convocation meeting at raledge chapel in which he was gifted in the arts, and holding forth and as the consequence of the length of his delivery and the monotone with which he delivered it, many of geisel's classmates were on the verge of deep rest. in order to keep himself awake, ted geisel produced an image of a bulbis calf underneath a

pleated skirt atop a high heel shoe. and the boy sitting to his right looked at that and asked ted to pass it over. and wrote under it as the caption, the fatted calf. a bond was formed immediately. the boy sitting next to him was normman mcclane. most of you know him as the author of "the river runs through it." i know him as the last professor to lecture at the university of chicago when i left there in 1973. ted geisel knew him as the editor of the "jack-o'-lantern" as a person who was truly a prince of the realm. his art, specifically his art of

satire, his art of -- let's call them fantastic flora and fonna. the boyds and the beasties as he called them. enabled him to develop the representation as a person in his classmates that could change the mood in any room, my delivering a white turn of phrase, or presenting an image, or constructing a satire on images and phrases that had been already been presented. he was known all around as a figure you wanted to be around. because he made you feel as if you were in good company. theodore geisel had turned dartmouth into a space in which

he could have honorary sibling produce persons for the rest of his life be the standards against which he would measure his own talent, figures on who's names he would based many of his characters, horton of "horton hears a who" is based on horton conrad, bill covens, he would dedicate books such as donald bartlett who went with him to dartmouth. he had a sense that dartmouth was the place he would never lose because he made a connection between this place and the place he went to when he needed to recover the resources of belonging and security. when all else seemed in

fragments and ruin. let me explain how that connection was sealed. theodore geisel had one ambition when he was at dartmouth. not to become an excellent scholar. he was 165th in a class of 385, he had a 2.65 grade point averaged. he explained he learned more in the "jack-o'-lantern" office in writing than any of the classes in english. a claim that we have forgiven him for. and as a consequence, he turned that jack-o'-lantern college into the face -- space in which he wanted his identity to be acknowledged. so his deep ambition throughout his first three years at dartmouth was to follow normman

mcclane as editor of "the jack-o'-lantern" on may 15th, 1924, that's the day on which horton finds the who. he was voted unanimously the editor of the "jack-o'-lantern." in 1925, his senior year, he went through a series of honors. all of the medals he hadn't been given in his past were awarded to him. voted for the cast, voted to the society, he was acknowledged as one the big men on campus, and when kenneth montgomery gathered together the most elite of the dartmouth elite, the group he called king author and the nights of the round table, you can imagine who king arthur was. can't have that for himself. he designated theodore geisel as one the knights. the knights of the round table

met once to decide on a vote. the most likely and the least likely to succeed. that vote achieved unanimity on only one category. the least likely to succeed, the unanimous selection was theodore geisel. theodore geisel loved that. because he was immediately able to transform it into a resource it had become so famous across campus for his next issue of the jack o." he had a way of turning every loss immediately into comic gain, into comic pleasure. except for one, which would happen on april 13th, 1925, when he invited all of the members of the jack o staff to gather together in the boarding house where he lived because he couldn't afford after the loss of the brewery to live in casten

gauntlet and have a party. an end of year party for the jack-o'-lantern to celebrate all of the triumphs. ted geisel who thought prohibition was organized hypocrisy, because that president had designated a bootlegger. he said he was good, because they made gin. he bought the gin from the book legger -- from the bootlegger. and all of the boys drank it. and then later in the night, this is april 13th, in hanover in 1925, the plumbing is challenged. one of the boys goes out on to the roof and i won't fill in the rest. but pa randel in sees fluids showering down from his roof

feared the worst offense. immediately called the town sheriff who immediately called the college dean. a man by the name of craven w.laycock. imagine that name at birth. imagine that name given you to at birth. you don't have options. one of them is to strike fear into everyone that said that name. that was the option that he chose. he sent on monday a letter to theodore geisel calling him to the deans office to get deans justice. and in the interim, he'd telegraphed ted's photograph and asked what's the worst punishment? his father said take away the editorship. it'll matter to him. he'll learn his lesson. his father wrote ted a letter supplements the deans punishment saying you've got to accept this punishment. and wipe the blot from the

family name. geisel was as you might imagine completely devastated. he was so devastated he had difficulty moving from his room for three days. he was write in his diary, i felt as if a rock had been rolled up against a tomb. because the part of me that mattered most has been forcibly dissevered from me. my identity had been taken. on the third day, however, he decided he'd begin to send images to "jack-o'-lantern" signed not under theodore geisel, but first the series of synonyms. first was matt osbourne, the warden, and then sante, and then

louis pasteur, and then an image of a figure passing through a desert with a humorous caption signed seuss. that's the first time the name seuss appeared. and it appears not only because ted geisel knows that craven laycock didn't have a computer. and he didn't know the s. in the middle initial stood for seuss. but because he wanted to connect with henrietta at this moment of impossible passage in which the dean was doing to his images on the jack o what his father had done to the his images on the plaster wall. and he needed the affirmation of

the figure that confirmed his art and he then began to carry out the deans punishment to the letter of the law. he didn't send in anything under his own name. and he removed his name, theodore geisel from it. and also by subtracting from his name, and taking his mother's name as the source of his art, had also done what his father asked. he had removed the blot from his record. this recovery of the self that emerged through the invention of the name seuss was actually producing in addition to the self that he already knew he was. a dimension of self inside

himself that was so resourceful that it would take the next 66 years of his life to exhaust. seuss moved from dartmouth in new hampshire to oxford university in england in 1926. that's the fourth of the places we'll go. and he went there because his father asked him in 1925, what are you doing to do when you graduate? and ted said, well, i've received a whitney fellowship to oxford. and his father became so excited by this, that he ran across the street to the neighbor, also a dartmouth man by the name of morris sherman, and he was the

editor of the springfield newspaper immediately published it. imagine ted in a position now in which he had to explain to his father that he hadn't quite received that fellowship, he's applied for it. but somebody else got it. much less worthy. his father who by this time had moved into real estate, smart move in the springfield, and become the zoo keeper in springfield, another smart move. , decided that to keep the geisel names, he'd have to take some of his father's inheritance and make what his son said come true by sending him to oxford college in 1926. when he was there, he was so

disgusted with the per pen issueness of the accomplish, who looked on at worthy of british contempt for two reasons. he was an immigrant through germany through his grandfather, and he had an american sense of humor. he was not clubbable there. he also was confronted with oxford dons who gave lextures and ted says, and i'm not going to disbelieve the truth of this. that he had an oxford don by the name of sir oliver onions who delivered a two-hour lecture on the variations in the commas and semicolons of king lair. ted said after he heard that lecture, he packed up all of his books, turned to ellen and said i'm going there with that flying cow. he came back to the united states and he decided he wanted to get out of springfield and go

to new york. and he decided that he wanted to turn all of his gifts as a satirist and as a cartoonist into his door opener for "the judge" magazine, which today would be the equivalent of the "the new yorker" by sending in the work he'd done for jack o. in 1925, 26, '27, the jack o was sold alongside the harvard lampoon and columbia jester. bennett surf worked for the columbia jester. at harvard lampoon, you had figured who's names today would resonate as the names of the most familiar cartoonist and satirist. includes bentley. when geisel brought his portfolio, he got some of his

cartoons published in "the judge." but he didn't get his big break in new york until a woman that was sitting in a beauty parlor paging through "the judge" magazine she had to go through the wrong beauty parlor which had the wrong magazines, and stopped her short of the her page turning. it was the image of a knight fully armoured laying supine in a bed with his huge dragon hovering over it. and the caption under the cartoon, by the former knight of the round table was "and to think i sprayed the whole castle with flint just the week before." flint was the name of a insecticide produced by mighty standard oil. the woman who saw this cartoon

was the wife of the advertising executive responsible for all of standard oils. she called her husband, lincoln sheeds, she was mrs. grace lincoln sheeds. hire this man immediately. he's the only one that can get this stuff off of the shelfs. fly tops is better and you know it. for the next 14 years from 1941 to to -- he had quick henry the flint, it was part of fred allen's routine. he was a made man in madison avenue. everyone knew quick henry. and theodore geisel was making in the depression era $12,000

secure salary, which today would be the equivalent of $500,000 a year. but there's something missing. and it began to feel the force of the something missing. first in 1931 when henrietta died. then when it goes back to germany in 1936, and beginning to create and to think that i saw it on mulberry street. when he creates and to think that i saw it on mulberry street, he began to feel there was something in the name seuss that had to be connect the experience of creating that name seuss when he had to get by an authoritarian censor in 1925 that sutured him to his getting by his father in 1912, and the little boys who screamed at him and through brick bats in 1914, and theodore roosevelt in 1918,

and that something that sutured, connected the seuss at dartmouth to henrietta seuss of springfield and made him feel there was a doctor there. who would heal the lost child. in every reader. that was when he awakened to the vocation. dr. seuss, that would take him through his career as an advertising man, through his career as a propagandaist, frank capra, after he left frank's studio, jack warner said will you write the script with "rebel without a cause"? he could have been a made man in

hollywood. instead, in 1953, after the failure of the only movie he tried to make, the 5,000 fingers of the dr. t, helen developed elaine barays syndrome. the figure who was a reputation of henrietta and the figure who made him feel as if he had been absolutely affirmed was falling apart. he turned to his art to recover relation to her and it by writing "horton hears a who" in 1954, which concludes with the line a person is a person no matter how small.

because the person who was becoming smaller and smaller was the child in geisel. who was losing the figure, who absolutely affirmed him. horton, henrietta, helen, all of those hs are deeply interrelated. they are all the same figure. of absolute loyalty and complete fidelity. when he returned to the childrens work, he'd abandoned for a fortune, he returned to a children book after world war ii to release himself from the aggressive mentality that had created the propaganda, that had created the satire, that create the his power to turn around all

of the aggression directed against him because as he said to helen, i feel as if i've become those little boys throwing brick bats at me. the sector of them. he returned from world war ii to write children's books that would get the war mentality out of readers everywhere. he believed in writing children's books in which it didn't matter when you are a sneech with a star or without, didn't matter what side you buttered your bread upon, he was showing under the most attractable antagonisms, the deep bond of human fellowship for him that was signaled first by the bond of helen, henrietta,

and dr. seuss. the last place i want to go is the title of the last book that he ever wrote. "all of the places that you will go." it's actually taken from a handshake, the class of 1925 produced at dartmouth. one member of the classes would say oh, the places you'll go. the other member of the class would say putting up his hand, the people you'll meet. when theodore geisel knew he was dying of cancer, he began writing a book, his last book, which contained images from all of his prior books that summarize his move from mulberry street through all of the places he went throughout his life. and he did so by relinking himself to the first place that made him feel as if he'd belonged to humanity. and to a home that couldn't be lost.

oh, the places you'll go is dedicated to his experiences at dartmouth. which was the magical world to which he returned. when he was letting go of the world. through which he had transited through so many sights of difficult passage. and letting go of it, he was producing the voice of an adult who would say to the little boy who was going through the places and places you'll go, what marco had wished his father would have said to him in mulberry street in the first book, dr. seuss created. he wanted to in his last book create a voice of apparent that would resonate through every other voice a child could hear and make that child feel empowered by the voice of

voices. the other side of a theodore roosevelt voice. a voice that said to any child who felt doubt, "oh, the places you'll go." you're on your way, kid. kid, you'll move mountains. he wanted that voice to be the voice he left as the voiceover of the doctor, theodore geisel existed to produce. that's all i wanted to say. [laughter] [applause] [applause] >> please. questions. yes? >> did his parents live to see him as a successful dr. seuss? >> his mother did not. clearly live to see him successful as the children's book writer. with the first children's book

he wrote, it was a collaboration, boners, he wrote it the year she died after she returned from the ancestral home in germany. his father did live. his father lived to be 89. and his father became for theodore geisel, a figure theodore realized dr. seuss had to help him recover a relation from. if you look at what i in the book called the springfield cycle, you'll see he's written after world war ii, if i ran the zoo, if i ran the circus, all of them with an adult figure who is a version of the parental figure talking to marco and i think i saw it in mulberry street, who finally into, "if i ran the circus" becomes a figure who's included in one of dr. seuss'

stories. and he dedicated, "if i ran the circus" to big ted, my dad, who is the best man in all of springfield. when bennett surf looked at what he called theodore geisel's springfield cycle, he say as editor at the "random house" i was people who called genius. my real genius is theodore geisel. he said, that springfield cycle is a memory cycle. it has condensed within it. a collected memory and a personal memory that's doing the work for children. a folk story. he had his own cycle in the springfield cycle, it's worth

reading, as an adult for that. no child needs to be told it's worth reading. please. >> i wonder if there's any evidence if ted geisel ever forgave theodore roosevelt for that? >> well, when ted geisel created the big hearted moose, and he -- who was, you know, a creature who was the reverse of theodore roosevelt. he had the pleasure of having one of the theodore roosevelt's children asking for that to be sent to the library. the roosevelt library. t.r., his father, t.r., theodore roosevelt, they were interlinked authority figures who were always the sources, the targets of theodore geisel's children's

satires. he did not like authoritarianism. whether it was in craven laycock or theodore roosevelt, or t.r., but he needed to work through that dislike, turned into aggression. which is why he wrote three ifs. so that's the only evidence. let's call it literary evidence, rather than factual. please. >> i have a story that goes back even further than your story. but i'm glad to hear how it was resolved. i've read the book. i went to the forest park zoo every sunday afternoon of my youth or childhood. and when i became a library at the ray school, i told the kids storied about the fact that his father was a zoo keeper. i may have embellished that a bit. but my mother's best friend went to elementary school with dr.

seuss in springfield. and when i told her later on about this classmate of hers who becomes so famous. she was astounded. she said he was always in the office. you know, he was doodling, oodling all the time. she was astounded. i was so happy to read in your book that his mother appreciated the doodling, perhaps his teachers didn't. >> might not have. in fact, his teacher, he went to one class in art instruction. and his teacher came up to him and he said, all of your figures are out of perspective. you are not an artist. stop it. give it up.

carla, a poet, once said that all of ted geisel's animals looked the same to her. she said they all look like they had the face of the mona lisa after the second martini. a slighty loopy face. at the second martini. geisel said she created figures that every child would recognize as a child's image. as the image a child could feel confidence she or he could also draw. which was to draw in the child. what -- the great big break in theodore geisel's experience as a children's book writer came in 1957. he was making about 5,000 a year. when he decided to give up hollywood and take up children's books. from 1953, until 1957, he was

making maximum 5,000 a year. in 1957, he took a challenge that began with john hershey wrote an essay in which he asked why can't johnny read? in that essay, he answered the question. because johnny doesn't want to read with all of those hideous dick and jane readers. why doesn't the children's author with the talent of dr. seuss that will want children to learn how to read? and so william spalding, who was in fort fox with theodore geisel in the capper unit became head of hooten mythlin. he was head of the childrens division, and they wanted a reader that would get children to learn how to read. it would replace dick and jane.

i want you to create a book that children will not be able to put down, using no more than 225 unique words chosen from this list. and geisel agreed to take the challenge. and he spent a year trying to figure out how to produce a work that would enable children to under go what could be called the first miracle in a child's life. the miracle called reading, in which the transition between an image and a world the difficult passage, between an image and a word would be traversed by the discovery of their interrelationship, and in order to achieve this marriage of word and image, he created a figure who's simultaneously a word image, and an image word, a

transitional object like his called "the cat in the hat." on the third image on your page, the cat in the hat is performing an action that performed the basis. reading from simply looking at an image, because it includes the perfective knowledge of what is perceived. the cats demand, look at me, look at me, look at me now with a cup and a cake and a top on my hat, i can hold up two books and i can hold up the fish, and a little toy ship. and some milk on a dish. the cats initial demand look at me now draws the children. the cat repeats the phrase, he oversees the transition from seeing to reading by implanting the desire to learn how to

participate in the process. whereby he does what he is saying. he acts as an image that performs the reflexive relation to the words for which he becomes imaginable. what takes place in the transition between looking and reading is the cats performance of the transitional relation between images and words. with each look at me, he communicates the desire to learn how to read. indeed, the cat might be described as the activity of reading personified. it was for -- it was an ingenius, ingenius vision for theodore geisel to invent the transitional object called "the cat in the hat" that allowed the major passage in every la