Theodor Seuss Geisel, the author of the Dr. Seuss books, spent years illustrating advertising copy and constructing political cartoons. He turned to children’s books as a more pleasant project to alleviate burnout. Geisel wrote the first dozen between 1937 and 1956 to respectable sales, but Dr. Seuss was hardly a household name. Then he got caught in the battle over how to teach children to read. The sight reading vs. phonics battle was heating up as children of the Baby Boom were starting school, using the same Dick and Jane primers that had been in use for decades.
It didn’t help that Dick and Jane belonged to what many have dubbed the dullest family on earth. The books were plotless, littered with mind-numbing, repetitious quasi-sentences. (“Look, Jane. Look, look. See Dick. See, see. Oh, see. See Dick.”) The illustrations were stodgy and bland. Flesch deemed the series “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless.” The author John Hersey, in an article on the literacy debate, for Life magazine, was not much kinder, calling the books “namby-pamby” and “insipid,” and the pictures “terribly literal.” Hersey wondered why primers couldn’t at least feature the talents of gifted children’s-book illustrators, and he listed Dr. Seuss among their ranks.
The head of Houghton Mifflin’s education division took note. He challenged Geisel to write a primer that emerging or reluctant readers would actually enjoy, pleading, “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down!” But for a wordsmith as playful and unconventional as Dr. Seuss—someone fond of phrases such as “howling mad hullaballoo,” who invented animals like the Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz—there was a big catch: to qualify as a first-grade primer, the text would have to be tightly restricted to a list of three hundred and fifty simple, pre-approved vocabulary words, supplied by the publisher, with a preferred limit of just two hundred and twenty-five words. Could Dr. Seuss deliver a page-turner that contained itself to no more than two hundred and twenty-five real, English, mostly monosyllabic words?
Geisel took on the challenge. Read how that transformed children’s literature at the New Yorker. -via Damn Interesting
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Source: neatorama