<P> Geisel gave varying accounts of how he conceived of The Cat in the Hat . According to the story Geisel told most often, he was so frustrated with the word list that William Spaulding had given him that he finally decided to scan the list and create a story out of the first two words he found that rhymed . The words he found were cat and hat . Near the end of his life, Geisel told his biographers, Judith and Neil Morgan, that he conceived the beginnings of the story while he was with Spaulding, in an elevator in the Houghton Mifflin offices in Boston . It was an old, shuddering elevator and was operated by a "small, stooped woman wearing' a leather half - glove and a secret smile"'. Anita Silvey, recounting a similar story, described the woman as "a very elegant, very petite African - American woman named Annie Williams". Geisel told Silvey that, when he sketched the Cat in the Hat, he thought of Williams and gave the character Williams' white gloves and "sly, even foxy smile". </P> <P> Geisel gave two conflicting, partly fictionalized accounts of the book's creation in two articles, "How Orlo Got His Book" in The New York Times Book Review and "My Hassle with the First Grade Language" in the Chicago Tribune, both published on November 17, 1957 . In "My Hassle with the First Grade Language", he wrote about his proposal to a "distinguished schoolbook publisher" to write a book for young children about "scaling the peaks of Everest at 60 degrees below". The publisher was intrigued but informed him that, because of the word list, "you can't use the word scaling . You can't use the word peaks . You can't use Everest . You can't use 60 . You can't use degrees . You can't ..." Geisel gave a similar account to Robert Cahn for an article in the July 6, 1957, edition of The Saturday Evening Post . In "My Hassle With the First Grade Language", he also told a story of the "three excruciatingly painful weeks" in which he worked on a story about a King Cat and a Queen Cat . However, "queen" was not on the word list, nor did his first grade nephew, Norval, recognize it . So Geisel returned to the work but could then think only of words that started with the letter "q", which did not appear in any word on the list . He then had a similar fascination with the letter "z", which also did not appear in any word on the list . When he did finally finish the book and showed it to his nephew, Norval had already graduated from the first grade and was learning calculus . Philip Nel notes, in his dissection of the article, that Norval was Geisel's invention . Geisel's niece, Peggy Owens, did have a son, but he was only a one - year - old when the article was published . </P> <P> In "How Orlo Got His Book", he described Orlo, a fictional, archetypal young child who was turned off of reading by the poor selection of simple reading material . To save Orlo the frustration, Geisel decided to write a book for children like Orlo but found the task "not dissimilar to...being lost with a witch in a tunnel of love". He tried to write a story called "The Queen Zebra" but found that both words did not appear on the list . In fact, like Geisel wrote in "My Hassle with the First Grade Language", the letters "q" and "z" did not appear on the list at all . He then tried to write a story about a bird, without using the word bird as it did not appear on the list . He decided to call it a "wing thing" instead but struggled as he discovered that it "couldn't have legs or a beak or a tail . Neither a left foot or a right foot ." On his approach to writing The Cat in the Hat he wrote, "The method I used is the same method you use when you sit down to make apple stroodle (sic) without stroodles ." </P> <P> Geisel variously stated that the book took between nine and 18 months to create . Donald Pease notes that he worked on it primarily alone, unlike with previous books, which had been more collaborative efforts between Geisel and his wife, Helen . This marked a general trend in his work and life . As Robert L. Bernstein later said of that period, "The more I saw of him, the more he liked being in that room and creating all by himself ." Pease points to Helen's recovery from Guillain--Barré syndrome, which she was diagnosed with in 1954, as the marker for this change . </P>

Where does the cat and the hat live