Growing up, we all read Dr. Seuss (i.e. Theodor Giesel). Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax and quite a few more are all sitting in a bookshelf somewhere in parent’s my home. As a child, I remember them as being easy-to-read funny stories, but reading about him as a (youngish) adult I realize there was a lot more to these stories than we likely realized.

Sure, they were easy to read, but the key to their success was that some of them were ridiculously easy to read. The Cat in the Hat used only 236 different words and Green Eggs and Ham, as a result of a bet, was written using only 50.

As Wikipedia describes:

In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, William Ellsworth Spaulding, the director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin who later became its Chairman, compiled a list of 348 words he felt were important for first-graders to recognize and asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words. Spaulding challenged Geisel to “bring back a book children can’t put down.” Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. It was described as a tour de force by some reviewers-—it retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Geisel’s earlier works, but because of its simplified vocabulary could be read by beginning readers.

Dr. Seuss wasn’t  just a literary genius because of his unique prose, he was a literary genius because he was able to his unique prose in a way that any young reader could both enjoy and understand.