The Cat in the Hat

The tall, red-and-white-hatted cat created by Theodor Geisel, writing as Dr. Seuss, arrived in 1957 and changed how children were taught to read in the English-speaking world. He turns up uninvited at the home of two bored children on a wet afternoon, causes a great deal of chaos, and tidies it all away before their mother returns.

The book's origins are unusually well documented and rather unglamorous. Concern had been growing through the 1950s that the primers used to teach reading were so dull that children were being put off books entirely. Geisel was handed a restricted list of words that beginning readers were expected to know and challenged to make something out of it. The result uses a famously small vocabulary and is written almost entirely in bouncing, insistent rhythm — the constraint is the reason the book sounds the way it does.

It worked commercially and pedagogically at once. The book displaced a generation of worthy, tedious readers, established a publishing imprint built on the same principle, and made its author one of the best-selling children's writers who has ever lived.

As a cat, he is an odd creation: an agent of pure disruption who arrives without permission, ignores every objection from the household's extremely sensible goldfish, and departs having technically broken no rules. Which is, most cat owners would agree, an entirely accurate portrait.