Louis Menand
The Cat in the Hat
On learning to read and children's literature...

Some feel there is no more elegant writer of American prose than Louis Menand... From the acclaimed author of "The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America," learn what it was about Theodor Geisel and his Cat in the Hat series that transformed the nature of primary education and children's books.

Louis Menand is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author, most recently, of the critically acclaimed The Metaphysical Club: A History of Ideas in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) in which he explores the world of American pragmatism. He is the author of a book on T.S. Eliot, Discovering Modernism (Oxford University Press, 1987); the editor of The Future of Academic Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and of Pragmatism: A Reader (Vintage, 1997). Mr. Menand received a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1980.