One Serious ‘Cat’

CAT LOVER: Philip Nel '92, director of the children's literature program at Kansas State, says Dr. Seuss's 1957 book, The Cat in the Hat, helped change the way most teachers thought about literature for kids.

So you think you know The Cat in the Hat? Not so fast.

Philip Nel ’92, whose new book marks the 50th anniversary of Dr. Seuss’s children’s favorite, says there’s much more to the story of the Cat who pronounces, “It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how.”

“Seuss is the best-selling children’s author in America, but few people take him seriously,” says Nel, the author of The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (Random House, 2007).

An associate professor of English at Kansas State University, where he also directs the children’s literature program, Nel says the time is right to give Seuss’s classic a rigorous—and fun—scholarlytreatment.

This year also has been a time to celebrate the arrival of the famous Cat and the author who created him. This spring, schoolchildren across the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of The Cat in the Hat’s publication with Cat readings, Suessian festivals, and othercelebrations.

And Nel was in high demand as an expert on Theodor Geisel—otherwise known as Dr. Seuss—and his influence on children’s literature.

He expounds on those ideas in The Annotated Cat, which features the text and illustrations of both The Cat in the Hat and its 1958 sequel, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, as well as essays by Seuss, draft material, photos, and extensive commentary on historical context, influences, and Seuss’s creativeprocess.

He investigates why the mother’s absence in The Cat in the Hat—“Our mother was out of the house for the day”—provoked no comment from 1950s reviewers but raises many questions for commentatorstoday.

He pores over old advertisements to demonstrate that “Dad’s $10 shoes” seized by the Cat in the sequel to clean up a spreading pink stain were, by 1950s costs, “moderately priced dress shoes—if they were on sale.”

And that pink stain? It’s not lost on Nel that Seuss was writing during the Cold War.

Although products of their historical moment, the books continue to be loved by children now.

That’s not hard to explain, says Nel. “It’s an exciting story, with a rhythm that makes kids want to keep reading.”

And the Cat is an appealing character. “To be a child is to be subject to rules,” Nel says, “but the Cat breaks rules and gets away with it”—something Seuss certainly approved of, he adds.

In fact, writing The Cat in the Hat was a kind of rule-breaking itself. In the mid-1950s, Americans were asking why their children weren’t better able to read. Author John Hersey suggested in Life magazine that Seuss—then the author of nine children’s books—should take a crack at writing something more interesting than the “Dick and Jane” primers that experts then thought were the most effective tool for teaching kids to read.

Initially, it sounded like an easy assignment, and Seuss expected it to take about a week to write. But there was a stipulation: In order to make sure the book would be at the proper reading level, Seuss had to limit himself to a list of about 200 words.

He spent a year and a half on the project—and Nel’s book records and pays tribute to the scope of his efforts.

Not only did Seuss write a book that left Dick and Jane in the dust, but there was a nation of children eager to read it.

“It was the time of the baby boom,” Nel points out. “He’s publishing The Cat in the Hat at a time when there’s such a market for children’s literature.”

An English and psychology major at Rochester, Nel now is a specialist in children’s literature and postmodern American literature.

The author of books such as Dr. Seuss: American Icon (Continuum, 2004) and The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (University of Mississippi, 2002), he ranges from work on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series to explorations of postmodern master DonDeLillo.

But Nel can still find his roots in Dr. Seuss.

“Dr. Seuss taught me to read, and also that reading is fun,” he says. “And that set me on my professional path.”

—Kathleen McGarvey