| If you’ve ever struggled with rejection, you might take heart in the story of Theodor Geisel, an aspiring children’s-book author who was turned down by twenty-seven publishers before finally finding one who would give him a chance. (It helped that he had a friend who worked there.) But Geisel, now more widely known as Dr. Seuss, would achieve his greatest successes later in his career, thanks in part to a surprising development: the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. As the New Yorker staff writer Louis Menand recounted in 2002, one of Dr. Seuss’s signature stories, “The Cat in the Hat,” arrived in bookstores the same year that the satellite reached space. The Sputnik breakthrough was acutely stressful for American defense analysts, but the timing proved fortuitous for Dr. Seuss and his publisher, for reasons explained by the article. Despite containing only 1,702 words—actually two hundred and twenty words, rhymed and repeated—the book presents an unexpectedly rich text, as much for adults as for children. (Revisiting the plot, Menand offers a provocative theory about a secret pact between the mischievous feline and the main characters’ missing parent.) At the time the article was published, “The Cat in the Hat” was the fourth best-selling children’s hardcover title of all time, a position that might actually understate its influence on American kids and their culture. “It was a tour de force,” Menand observes, “and it killed Dick and Jane.” | 
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