Geisel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his grandparents lived on Mulberry Street - hence the title of his first book. One of his most popular books, Green Eggs and Ham, was the result of a bet that he could not write a book using only 50 words. Spaulding challenged Geisel to 'bring back a book children can't put down.' Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. 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. 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. She said he was always thinking: 'What might they do next? What might they ask next?' She added: 'He couldn't just sit down on the floor and play with them.' Some have claimed that Dr Seuss never even liked children! His widow, Audrey, said in an interview that he was slightly afraid of them. He nearly burned his first book, And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street, after it was turned down by 27 publishers.

He's sold more books than JK Rowlingīetween 19, when he died aged 87, Dr Seuss published more than 40 books, which have sold half a billion copies between them - more even than J K Rowling's Harry Potter books. He added the Dr later, as a joke, because his father had always wanted him to get a doctorate and become a professor. He started using it as a pseudonym at university. Dr Seuss was not a real doctorĭr Seuss' real name was Theodore Seuss Geisel - Seuss being his mother's maiden name. Katie Mitchell’s stage adaptation of The Cat in the Hat first played in the National Theatre's Cottesloe Theatre in December 2009, before transferring to the Young Vic in 2010. The curious and intricate rhyming found in The Cat in the Hat is still adored decades later with over 250 million copies sold worldwide in more than 20 different languages. It marked the transition of Theodor Seuss Geisel from successful advertising executive and political cartoonist, to world-famous illustrator and children's author. The Cat in the Hat was first published in 1957 as Dr. Katie Mitchell’s acclaimed stage adaptation of Dr Seuss’s The Cat In The Hat will embark on its first UK tour in 2015, playing at Wycombe Swan from Thu 23 - Sat 25 July.

10 facts about Dr Seuss and his fantastic books

Cat and the hat book