Dr. Seuss Was Rejected 27 Times
Quick answer: Dr. Seuss was rejected 27 times before a chance street meeting saved Mulberry Street. The true story of the walk that nearly ended a career in 1937.
Picture a man in his early thirties walking down Madison Avenue in New York in 1937, carrying a manuscript he has decided to burn. Theodor Seuss Geisel, a successful advertising illustrator best known for insecticide campaigns, had written and drawn a children's book in rollicking anapaestic rhythm about a boy who inflates a horse and wagon into a spectacular parade. Publisher after publisher had turned it down. By the most commonly cited count, the one Geisel himself repeated in interviews, twenty-seven houses said no. He was heading home to feed the manuscript to the fire in his apartment.
On that walk he ran into Mike McClintock, an old Dartmouth classmate, who asked what he was carrying. McClintock had, that very morning, started a job as a children's book editor at Vanguard Press. Within hours Geisel was in an office signing a contract, and 'And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street' was published later that year. Geisel liked to say afterwards that if he had been walking down the other side of the street, he would have ended up in the dry cleaning business. It is the most literal near miss in the history of children's literature.
Twenty-seven noes, give or take
A word of honesty about the number, because this collection deals only in documented fact: Geisel told the story many times across five decades, and the count of rejections shifted in the telling, sometimes twenty, sometimes twenty-seven, occasionally higher. Twenty-seven is the figure most often cited and the one that has settled into the record. What never changed in any version was the substance: the book was rejected by essentially every major house that saw it, and Geisel was on the verge of destroying it when chance intervened.
The stated objections have been widely reported in paraphrase: the book was too fanciful, verse was considered unsellable for children, and it lacked the moral instruction that publishers of the era expected a children's book to deliver. Those objections were not stupid. They accurately described the market of 1937. What the twenty-seven editors could not see was that the market was wrong, and that a book which trusted a child's appetite for rhythm and absurdity would help create an entirely new one.
The rhythm came from a ship's engines
The book itself had unusual origins. In 1936 Geisel and his wife Helen were returning from Europe aboard the MS Kungsholm, and he has said that the relentless rhythm of the ship's engines lodged in his head. To pass the long crossing he began fitting words to the beat, and the metre of that engine noise became the galloping anapaests of Mulberry Street. Poets will recognise the process instantly: metre found in the body first, sense fitted to it afterwards.
It is worth pausing on the fact that a grown man crossing the Atlantic entertained himself by scanning engine noise. Geisel had trained his ear through years of light verse and advertising copy, work that most literary people of his time would have called beneath serious notice. The advertising years taught him compression, repetition and the exact weight of a syllable, and every one of those skills is visible in the books that made him famous.
What happened after the street corner
Vanguard published 'Mulberry Street' in 1937 to warm reviews and modest sales, and Geisel followed it with more books through the 1940s while also working as a political cartoonist and, during the war, making training films. The transformation into a household name came twenty years after that street corner. In 1954, the writer John Hersey published a piece in Life magazine blaming dull school primers for children's reading problems and suggesting, in passing, that someone like Dr. Seuss should write one instead.
William Spaulding of Houghton Mifflin took the idea literally and challenged Geisel to write a book that first graders could not put down, using a restricted beginner vocabulary list. Geisel found the constraint maddening and later said he struggled for months before building the story around the first two rhyming words he could find on the list. The result, 'The Cat in the Hat' (1957), uses only 236 distinct words and changed children's publishing permanently. Three years later his publisher Bennett Cerf bet him fifty dollars that he could not write a book using only fifty different words. Geisel won the bet with 'Green Eggs and Ham', which became one of the best-selling children's books ever printed. Across his career his books have sold more than 600 million copies worldwide.
Luck, honestly accounted for
This story turns on outrageous luck, and pretending otherwise would insult your intelligence. A friend, on the right pavement, on the right morning, newly employed in exactly the right job: no writing manual can teach that. But look at what luck required before it could operate. The manuscript existed, finished and polished, physically under his arm. It had survived twenty-seven rejections without being destroyed or abandoned in a drawer. And Geisel had spent years in a community of educated, connected people, so that a chance encounter could be an encounter with an editor.
Luck is real and it is not distributed fairly. What a writer controls is the surface area luck can land on: finished work, work in circulation, work physically or digitally present where publishing people pass by. Geisel's fire was postponed by a hundred metres of pavement. Your equivalent of the pavement is every contest deadline, open submission window and reading you almost skip.
What a working writer can take from this
First, constraints are a gift wrapped in barbed wire. The two most successful books Geisel ever wrote came from vocabulary restrictions he resented. If your poems are drifting, impose a hard limit: fifty words, one sentence per line, a borrowed metre. The fight against the constraint generates the invention. Contest themes work the same way, which is why judges scoring creativity so often reward the entry that treats the theme as a puzzle rather than a label.
Second, respect your unrespectable training. Geisel's advertising doggerel was his apprenticeship, and nothing you have written for money, or for fun, or for a greeting card, is wasted if you extracted craft from it. Third, keep the manuscript out of the fire. The gap between twenty-seven rejections and immortality was one conversation, and conversations only happen to work that still exists. If a piece of yours has been sitting quietly since its last rejection, send it somewhere this month rather than burning it; Writory's contest window runs from the 1st to the 25th, and every entry gets read and scored, which is more than twenty-seven publishers gave Mulberry Street.
What poets can take from this
- Never destroy a finished manuscript in the same season you lose faith in it.
- Impose hard formal constraints when your writing goes slack; scarcity forces invention.
- Treat commercial or throwaway writing as paid craft training, not embarrassment.
- Tell people what you are working on; chance only helps writers whose work is visible.
- Let rhythm lead sometimes: write to a beat first and fit the sense afterwards.
- Keep count of your rejections and set your quitting threshold higher than twenty-seven.
Try it yourself
Take a mechanical rhythm from your day, a train, a fan, a washing machine, and transcribe its beat. Now write a poem whose metre matches it exactly, about something the machine could never understand.
Questions
How many publishers rejected Dr. Seuss's first book?
The most commonly cited figure is 27 rejections for 'And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street', though Geisel gave varying counts in different interviews. What is beyond doubt is that nearly every house that saw it declined, and Vanguard Press published it in 1937 after a chance street meeting.
Was Dr. Seuss really about to burn the manuscript?
Yes, by his own repeated account. He was walking home along Madison Avenue intending to burn the book when he met Mike McClintock, a Dartmouth classmate who had just become a children's editor at Vanguard Press that same morning and bought the book.
How many words are in The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham?
'The Cat in the Hat' (1957) uses 236 distinct words, written to a beginner vocabulary challenge from publisher William Spaulding. 'Green Eggs and Ham' (1960) uses just 50 distinct words, written to win a fifty-dollar bet with Bennett Cerf.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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