One of America’s most beloved authors of children’s books, Theodor Seuss Geisel — otherwise known as Dr. Seuss — came up with his classic tome, Cat in the Hat, because of a challenge. It all started when Life magazine published an article on illiteracy among children in America in May 1954. The article concluded that children weren’t reading because their books were boring.
William Ellsworth Spaulding, who was then the director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin, decided to try to rectify the situation, at least the part about publishing boring books. He compiled a list of 348 words that Spaulding believed all first graders should know. That’s when he turned to the “Doctor” and asked him to trim the list back to 250 and “bring back a book children can’t put down,” says Wikipedia. Nine months later, Geisel completed The Cat in the Hat, using 236 of the words given to him.