Dr Seuss's thank-you letter to man who saved his first book

The Cat in the Hat author was going to destroy early story believing it was unsaleable

A grateful letter from Dr Seuss to the former college classmate who stopped The Cat in the Hat author from burning his first children’s book manuscript is set to be auctioned later this week.

Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, was an advertising artist who had written his first tale for children, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in 1936. It had been rejected by dozens of publishers when he bumped into Mike McClintock. As he writes in a 1957 letter to his old friend from Dartmouth College: “You picked me off Madison Ave with a manuscript that I was about to burn in my incinerator because nobody would buy it. And you not only told me how to put Mulberry Street together properly … (as you did later with the 500 Hats), but after you’d sweated this out with me, giving me the best and only good information I have ever had on the construction of a book for this mysterious market, you even took the stuff on the road and sold it.”

Related: How Dr Seuss could simplify boring, wordy documents

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