And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is Theodor Seuss Geisel's first children's book published under the name Dr. Seuss. First published by Vanguard Press in 1937, the story follows a boy named Marco, who describes a parade of imaginary people and vehicles traveling along a road, Mulberry Street, in an elaborate fantasy story he dreams up to tell his father at the end of his walk. However, when he arrives home, he decides instead to tell his father what he actually saw—a simple horse and wagon.
Geisel conceived the core of the book aboard a ship in 1936, returning from a European vacation with his wife. The rhythm of the ship's engines captivated him and inspired the book's signature lines: "And that is a story that no one can beat. And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street."
At least 20 publishers rejected the book before Geisel ran into an old college classmate, who had just become juvenile editor at Vanguard Press. Vanguard agreed to publish the book, and it met with high praise from critics upon release, though sales were not as impressive. Later analyses of the book have focused on its connections to Geisel's childhood; the street of the title is probably named after a street in Geisel's hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. Geisel returned to fictionalized versions of Springfield in later books, and Marco appeared again in 1947 in the Dr. Seuss book McElligot's Pool.
In March 2021, the Seuss Estate removed the book from publication due to images in the book that the estate deemed "hurtful and wrong".
Plot
While walking home from school, a boy named Marco recalls his father's words: "Marco, keep your eyelids up and see what you can see." However, the only thing Marco has seen on his walk is a horse pulling a wagon on Mulberry Street. Marco begins to envision a more fantastical scene; he first turns the horse into a zebra, then a reindeer, and finally an elephant accompanied by two giraffes. The wagon turns into a chariot, then a sled, then a cart carrying a brass band.
Upon realizing that Mulberry Street intersects with Bliss Street, Marco adds a group of police escorts. The scene becomes a parade with a grandstand filled with the mayor and city officials, an airplane dropping confetti, and more. Marco arrives home, eager to share his fanciful story with his father. However, when his father questions him about what he saw on his way home, he grows embarrassed and responds, "Nothing but a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street."
Background
Geisel was 33 and had ten years of experience in cartooning, illustrating and advertising when he began work on Mulberry Street. He had an established and prosperous career in advertising, including a contract with Standard Oil for Flit bug spray. Geisel's popular campaign featured the line "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" He had also made some forays into book publishing: for Viking Press in 1931 he illustrated Boners and More Boners, collections of quotations from children's school papers. The book's positive sales encouraged Geisel to create his own children's book, which his advertising contract did not forbid. In 1932, Geisel wrote and illustrated an alphabet book featuring a collection of odd animals, but was unable to interest publishers in it.
The Morgans<!-- A hyphen is not needed here --> based<!-- as "The Morgans based" is a noun phrase and a verb, not an adjectival phrase.--> this account on interviews with Geisel, who had given similar accounts of the book's creation to journalists throughout his career, often omitting or altering various details. In one version, he had already been working on the book for six months before the European trip, and the trip home provided the final breakthrough. In another, he claimed he had the book about half finished when they landed in the United States.
Geisel, in his perfectionism, struggled with writing Mulberry Street. According to the Morgans, "although he lived for wit, his flights of fancy were subject to strict review". He spent at least six months on the book, questioning every word and writing numerous drafts. He wrote the poem out in pencil on yellow paper and asked his wife to discuss every page with him. Publishers posited a variety of criticisms of the book, including that fantasy was not salable, that children's books written in verse were out of style, and that the book lacked a clear moral message. McClintock had just become juvenile editor at Vanguard Press and took Geisel to his office to introduce him to Vanguard's President James Henle and editor Evelyn Shrifte. Henle had been gaining a reputation for signing authors whom other, larger publishers had rejected. He soon agreed to publish the book, but stipulated that its title be changed. Geisel cited the incident for his belief in luck and later stated, "If I had been walking down the other side of Madison Avenue, I'd be in the dry-cleaning business today". Vanguard Press printed 15,000 copies of the book for its first printing. To promote the book, Henle bought a full-page advertisement in Publishers Weekly, which reproduced the book's two-page spread of a reindeer pulling a cart and featured the line, "Book publishers, hitch on! This is the start of a parade that will take you places!" Although Geisel later moved to Random House, Vanguard continued to publish Mulberry Street and his second book, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, until 1988, when Random House bought Vanguard.
The book has received only one textual revision. In 1978, Geisel agreed to a slight rewording, renaming the character who appears near the end of the story a "Chinese man" instead of a "Chinaman". He also agreed to remove the character's pigtail and the yellow coloring from the character's skin. However, he denied on multiple occasions requests from feminists to change the lines "Say—anyone could think of that,/ Jack or Fred or Joe or Nat—/ Say, even Jane could think of that". Clifton Fadiman wrote a one-sentence review in The New Yorker, which Geisel could still quote near the end of his life: "They say it's for children, but better get a copy for yourself and marvel at the good Dr. Seuss' impossible pictures and the moral tale of the little boy who exaggerated not wisely but too well". The New York Times wrote: "Highly original and entertaining, Dr Seuss' picture book partakes of the better qualities of those peculiarly America institutions, the funny papers and the tall tale. It is a masterly interpretation of the mind of a child in the act of creating one of those stories with which children often amuse themselves and bolster up their self-respect". Geisel himself was later critical of the book, saying on its 25th anniversary: "I think I was a little aloof, too outside there. It was written from the point of view of my mind, not the mind of a child".
While Mulberry Streets sales grew significantly as the Dr. Seuss brand became more famous, In 2012, on the occasion of the book's 75th anniversary, Michael Winerip argued that later Dr. Seuss books were more entertaining and inventive than Mulberry Street but that it is nevertheless important as a harbinger of the many books that followed.
Analysis
Autobiographical elements and influences
thumb|alt=A color photo. Down the middle runs a tree-lined sidewalk, with a fenced grassy area to the left and a street to the left, lined with houses.|Geisel was likely thinking of the real-life [[Mulberry Street (Springfield, Massachusetts)|Mulberry Street of the Springfield, Massachusetts of his youth.]]
Some writers have focused on Mulberry Streets connections to elements of Geisel's life, particularly his childhood in Springfield, Massachusetts. Geisel probably named the street in his story after a real-life Mulberry Street in Springfield. Guy McLain, director of the Springfield Museum, contends that Geisel may have chosen the street due to its proximity to a bakery owned by his grandparents, as well as the sound and rhythm of its name. Cori Urban claimed that the mayor in the story resembles Fordis C. Parker, who was mayor of Springfield from 1925 to 1929.
Charles Cohen notes that, while the book mentions the intersection of Bliss and Mulberry Streets, their real-life counterparts in Springfield do not cross.
Jonathan Cott noted that Mulberry Street is similar to "Der Erlkönig", a German poem by Goethe, "for both of them are about a father and a son and about the exigencies and power of the imagination". When Cott told Geisel about this, Geisel responded by quoting the first two lines of the poem, in German. He also noted that he was raised in a German-speaking home, minored in German in college, and had memorized the poem while in high school. She argues that the horse and wagon at the beginning of the story evokes the peaceful German Americans of Springfield, and by extension the non-threatening actions of Germany. As Marco's story evolves, the horse and wagon transform into a parade, which Galbraith equates with "a military monolith ... marching down main street as an airplane drops confetti". a message that appears again in The Cat in the Hat. a Socrates-like figure who insists on intellectual integrity and thwarts Marco's desire to mold mundane reality into something more exciting than it is. To Patrick Shannon, "Marco escapes into his imagination to combat the insipid character and conformity of the adult world". In this sense, the book follows an individualist, child-centered trend in children's literature beginning in the mid-20th century, also seen in the works of Maurice Sendak and William Steig; this is in contrast to the norm in earlier children's books where the author tried to impart outside values on the child reader. The child's untruthful response that he had not seen anything interesting on Mulberry Street is not out of disrespect to the parent, but is Marco's attempt to reconcile his perspective with the authoritative, adult one of his father.
Verse style
Nel notes that Geisel makes heavy use of anapestic tetrameter in Mulberry Street and many of his later books, citing the rhythm and draw of the books' language as a main reason for their appeal. Fensch marks Mulberry Street as the start of what he calls "escalating sequences or escalating action", a technique Geisel used in most of his books, in which the action builds with each page. By linking text and image, the book helps children follow the story even if they cannot read every word of the text. By encouraging children to explore the page, the drawings allow them to use their imaginations to fill in gaps in the text. of the book with the strong, loose, energetic line
Adaptations
thumb|upright|alt=A black-and-white photograph of the upper portion of a man in glasses, looking leftward.|[[Deems Taylor (pictured) adapted Mulberry Street into an orchestral work, Marco Takes a Walk (1942).]]
Composer Deems Taylor adapted Mulberry Street into an orchestral work, Marco Takes a Walk. The work opens with a theme that represents the horse and wagon, which is followed by six variations that represent the various changes in Marco's story. The work's premiere, conducted by Howard Barlow, occurred at Carnegie Hall on November 14, 1942.
A short film based on the book was released by Paramount Pictures in 1944. It was made by George Pal as part of his Puppetoons series, which featured a film adaptation of Geisel's The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins the year before. The Mulberry Street adaptation was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoon) in 1945. After several books in prose, Geisel returned to verse for 1940's Horton Hatches the Egg, using the same "galloping, rollicking, anapestic tetrameter rhyme scheme" he had used for Mulberry Street. In a later series of children's stories for Redbook magazine, Geisel reported "the latest news from Mulberry Street". In "Marco Comes Late", Marco attempts to explain why he is two hours late to school. McElligot's Pool (1947), If I Ran the Zoo (1950), and If I Ran the Circus (1956) take place in different fictionalized versions of Springfield. Each also features a young protagonist who, when prompted by an adult, responds with "a series of increasingly fantastic scenarios". Another group of children held up a banner that read, "And to think that we saw him on Mulberry Street".
In 1961, the book was given the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
In 2017, there was some controversy regarding the stereotypical depiction of a Chinese man in a mural at the Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum, which was derived from the book. The mural showed the character with chopsticks, a pointed hat, and slanted eyes, raising concerns about children's exposure to the "Chinaman". In October of 2017, the mural was finally removed after three authors refused to attend a museum event in protest. While the company did not specify the offending images, the National Post noted Mulberry Streets depiction of a "Chinese man" with slanted eyes, a conical hat, wooden clogs, and eating rice with chopsticks. Early printings of the book called the character a "Chinaman" and depicted him with a queue and yellow skin; these elements were removed in the 1970s. Other impacts included the collectors' value of Mulberry Street, as cash offerings rose substantially on eBay before the listings were removed for "offensive content".
See also
- Mulberry (disambiguation)
- Mulberry Street (disambiguation)