The Cat in the Hat is 50

The Cat in the Hat is 50 years old
When it was published in 1957, the Cat was an instant success.
It has everything a classic needs — a great plot, great characters, wonderful illustrations and a unique voice, says Anita Silvey, author of 100 Best Books for Children.
"Some books we read and we forget them right away," she says. "But there are those other books, that they just stay with us. And The Cat in the Hat is that kind of book."
And that means if you grew up reading The Cat in the Hat, there's a pretty good chance your children will read it, too.
According to Philip Nel, author of The Annotated Cat, a book editor had seen a 1954 Life magazine article by the writer John Hersey.
In that article, Hersey took on a problem that was bothering Americans at the time: Why Johnny can't read. Hersey concluded that the "Dick and Jane" readers that most schools used were just too boring. Hersey suggested that Dr. Seuss write a new reading primer for the nation's schoolchildren.
Nel says that Spaulding liked that idea and issued a challenge to Dr. Seuss.
"He said, 'Write me a story that first-graders can't put down.' And so Seuss did and he wrote The Cat in the Hat to replace Dick and Jane. And it was a huge hit. It was a huge commercial success from the moment of its publication. It really is the book that made Dr. Seuss, Dr. Seuss," Nel says.
Dr. Seuss had been a fairly successful children's book author up until then, though he was not yet a household name. He thought it would be easy to write the book Spaulding wanted, and expected to dash it off in no time. It took him a year and a half. Seuss underestimated how hard it would be to write a book using just over 200 words, Nel says.
"Seuss was used to inventing words when he needed them, so to stick to a word list was a huge challenge for him," Nel says. "And, in fact, his favorite story about the creation of The Cat in the Hat is that it was born out of his frustration with the word list. He said he would come up with an idea, but then he would have no way to express that idea. So he said...: 'I read the list three times and almost went out of my head. I said I'll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that will be my book. I found cat and hat and I said the title will be The Cat in the Hat.'"
In the end, Nel says, Seuss used exactly 236 words to write The Cat in the Hat, words that young readers can understand.
By May 1958, Random House had sold over 200,000 copies of The Cat in the Hat. By November, it had sold 300,000. By the end of 1960 The Cat in the Hat was about to reach a million copies sold, its $1.95 price bringing "its retail gross to nearly two million dollars
The baby boom was a major factor in Seuss's success. In 1952, women in the United States gave birth to 3.9 million children. Those children turned five in 1957, the year The Cat in the Hat came out. As an article in a 1964 issue of Business Week reported, the "60 million children now under 14" represented a huge market for children's books: "The yearly total of titles has doubled since 1954, to nearly 3,000 last year. Total juvenile sales have doubled since 1957, from $56 million to an estimated $138 million in 1963."
In other words, the baby boom created a boom in children's books.

from The Annotated Cat by Philip Nel, copyright © 2007 by Philip Nel. From NPR