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Multiple generations of children have now grown up enjoying the wildly imaginative rhyming works written and illustrated by Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Bartholomew and the Oobleck, If I Ran the Zoo, Horton Hears a Who!, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and many other books involving Seuss' trademark ludicrous situations pursued with relentless logic have formed the core of many a child's personal library. In 1957, Seuss produced his classic children's tale The Cat in the Hat, which used only 236 different words, all of them taken from an average first-grader's vocabulary list. That effort grew out of a challenge to Seuss posed by a publisher: This work was followed by a series of books employing ever more limited vocabularies: Ten Apples up on Top!, Hop on Pop, Fox in Socks, and the book that most exemplifies this trend (and is perhaps the best known of all of Seuss' efforts), Green Eggs and Ham. The minimalist bent by Seuss that produced Green Eggs and Ham was also the result of a challenge from a publisher. Seuss' Beginner Books publishing venture was an imprint of Random House, which had been co-founded by Bennett Cerf, and Cerf made a friendly bet with Seuss for the latter to pen a book using no more than fifty different words. Seuss took Cerf up on his challenge and in 1960 produced a classic children's work many of us can still recite from memory, as detailed by The Art of Dr. Seuss project: As the project noted, the wager was a small price for what ultimately became a national treasure. For the curious, here is a list of the 50 words that appear in Green Eggs and Ham: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.
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