Dr. Seuss was not a doctor, neither of medicine, nor of humane letters.  Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991) began using his middle name, which was also his mother’s maiden name, as a pseudonym in order to get his contributions to Dartmouth’s humor magazine, Jack-O-Lantern, past school officials at Dartmouth who, following Geisel’s involvement in an “illicit” party, had him removed as editor in chief.

Though Geisel did matriculate to Oxford University in 1925, intending to attain a doctorate and become a professor, he left less than a year later, at least partly as a result of his future wife Helen Palmer’s suggestion that he become an artist instead.  And, of course, Geisel did work first as a cartoonist for magazines, like Judge (a New York weekly humor magazine), beginning in 1927, and later as a successful commercial illustrator in advertising.

But Geisel’s career as Dr. Seuss (a household name) and as the author and illustrator of forty-four children’s books at the time of his death, such beloved classics as The Cat in the Hat (1957), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957), began as a dinner invitation and challenge from William Spaulding, who was then the director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin.

“Write me a story that first-graders can’t put down!” Spaulding commanded.  As if that dictum was not enough in itself, there was something else: Geisel could use only 220 different words for the entire book.  Spaulding had taken this idea from Rudolf Franz Flesch’s 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read--And What You Can Do About It.  

In the back of his book, Flesch had appended 72 varying lists of words, which first-graders were expected to be able to recognize.  As a Ph.D. and graduate of Columbia’s Teachers College, Flesch had an interest in the art of communication, as well as the pedagogy of writing and reading.

According to the reading doctor himself, Johnny couldn’t read because the “word” or “look-say” method of reading by which Johnny had been taught was grossly ineffective.  By teaching students to read through the memorization and recognition of individual words, this method--so ran the argument--severely limited children’s ability to read words that they had never before seen or memorized.  Flesch’s prescription was phonics, the method of learning the sounds made by individual and combined letters and then reading words, whether previously encountered or new, by sounding out each word.

Why Johnny Can’t Read leveled an unapologetic attack against individual children’s primers like the famous Dick and Jane series, which Flesch described as “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers.”

When William Spaulding invited Geisel to dinner in 1955, his intention was to spur Geisel to create a counter-model to the “pallid primers [with] abnormally courteous, unnaturally clean boys and girls,” which is how John Hersey, in a 1954 Life magazine article, referred to the books used in public schools to teach children how to read.

A year and a half after dining with Spaulding, Geisel--under the pen name of Dr. Seuss--had written The Cat in the Hat (1957) with just 236 distinct words.  Within weeks of publication, it was selling 12,000 copies a month.  By 1960, The Cat in the Hat had sold a million copies and, by 2000, it had sold 7.2 million hardcover copies in the the United States alone.

This success led Bennett Cerf, the Random House publisher who “lent” Geisel to Spaulding at Houghton Mifflin for the purpose of writing The Cat in the Hat, to create Beginner Books at Random House.  Cerf installed his wife Phyllis and Geisel at the helm of this new children’s division.

Phyllis Cerf culled a list of 379 words from sundry primers.  The template consisted of the 200 words that authors could use from this “master” list, in addition to the 20 “emergency” words that they could compile themselves.  From such an arrangement, Beginner Books published four titles in 1958.  By 1960, this new division was generating a million dollars a year, soon making Random House the largest publisher of children’s books in the United States.  Today, Random House Children’s Books is the largest English-language children’s trade book publisher in the world.

From Cerf’s template, a hundred Beginner Books were eventually published--one of them was Green Eggs and Ham (1960).  Other titles by Seuss included The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958), Hop on Pop (1963), and Fox in Socks (1965).  The template of these Dr. Seuss books proved to be simple, yet sensible; innovative, yet transgressive (with a meaningful purpose); and creatively and colorfully reproducible.

Green Eggs and Ham, which has become a beloved classic, resulted from a fifty-dollar wager between Bennett Serf and Geisel: Serf bet Geisel that he could not write a book with just 50 words.  Of course, Geisel (aka Seuss) won the bet, having written Green Eggs and Ham with 49 monosyllabic words and 1 polysyllable, to wit, "anywhere."  It became the best-selling book that Seuss had ever written, and still is the fourth among children’s top-selling hardcover titles of all time.

While Green Eggs and Ham became the barn door of children’s book sales, The Cat in the Hat, with more than 11 million copies in print, proved that illustrated storybooks (as opposed to primers and textbooks) could successfully be used to teach children how to read and that phonics was a bona fide reading method.

Nearly four decades after the advent of hip-hop, today’s children--black, white, and other--live in a cat-in-the-hat world: dangers and chaos lurk all around, even in the schools.  If nothing else, hip-hop has demonstrated that any number of blacks are gifted enough with words and meter to have produced an original idiom through which so many of the younger generation choose to express themselves or to simply admire.  (Without solicitation, a twenty-something-year-old, white woman once recited for me what she considered the best one-liners ever of the Notorious B.I.G.)

Yet, of all the thuggish, “conscious,” and Oil-of-Olay rappers, is there not one who can improve upon the following verse:

“I can hold up TWO books!

I can hold up the fish!

And a little toy ship!

And some milk on a dish!”?

If Wu-Tang is “for the children,” as the late ODB proclaimed, then where is the 26 Chambers of Reading or Wu-Consonants & Vowels Just for You?

But, perhaps rappers or emcees are not suited for that kind of work.  Maybe a new category is needed . . . a band of bards . . . a troop of troubadours who roam cities and towns, teaching children the building blocks of literacy: the 26 letters of our alphabet and the 44 sounds made from them.

Black people have invented or improved upon many things of an artistic and mechanical nature: a compound horseshoe and hip-hop, the blues and an artificial palate, the Lindy Hop and a lubricator for locomotives.  So, why should a series of illustrated storybooks, rhymed in anapestic dimeter for beginners and in iambic tetrameter for older readers propose an insurmountable obstacle?  There is even such a thing as Pimp Juice for the “players,” but no innovative, convention-breaking abecedarian for early readers who happen to be African-American.

In order to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you, of course, need boots with straps.  For black children in America, reading is a free and good start.  And these children need something!  Reading scores from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that there is a 26-point gap between white and black fourth-graders.  In California, where only 18 percent of all fourth-graders are “proficient” in reading, African-American fourth-graders reading at the “proficient” level is a mere 14 percent.  And, even in states with a higher percentage of black, reading-proficient fourth-graders--Massachusetts, 23 percent; Colorado, 27 percent; New Hampshire, 28 percent; Vermont, 29 percent--these higher percentages are due to the comparatively low number of African-American students enrolled in those states’ schools.

Without retooling or black-facing Dr. Seuss books, there are definite qualities of the latter that are worth emulating: the signature use of colors, the deliberate flaunting of primer-book conventions, the use of polysyllabic rhymed meter, the expression of real-life issues, and the publication of subsequent books (dozens of them), making those books a veritable institution of teaching children how to read.

If millions of baby boomers like Louis Menand, the Pulizter Prize-winning author and academic, learned to read from Seuss books, which used rhythm, transgression, chaos, and excitement to enthrall young readers, then what sort of semiotics would appeal to African-American children today?  Who is the “cat” that can guarantee that liberty for these children entails literacy?