What starts out as a boring horse and cart on Mulberry Street turns becomes the best story ever! On his way home from school one day, Young Marco lets his mind wander and his creativity run wild in this story. Young Marco creates a colourful ensemble of characters out of little more than a horse and cart, making Mulberry Street the talk of the town.
For over half a century, Dr. Seuss has been inspiring young readers and fostering a love of reading with his signature blend of off-the-wall stories, off-the-wall illustrations, and riotous rhymes. Dr. Seuss, author of the brilliantly anarchic “Cat in the Hat,” and one of the most popular authors for children in history, has sold nearly half a billion copies of his books around the world.
The protagonist of this narrative is a young child named Marco, who, while walking home from school, makes up a fantastical tale about a procession of people and automobiles moving along a street called Mulberry Street, which he then tells to his father. When he gets home, though, he chooses to give his dad the straight story about what he saw: a simple horse and cart.
Contents
Seuss’s Career
Seuss’s career as a children’s author, and the publication of his debut book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, nearly didn’t happen. If Seuss hadn’t run across an old friend from Dartmouth, Mike McClintock, who had just started a position as an editor in the children’s division at Vanguard Press, he might have burned his book in the incinerator of his apartment building. That day, the two of them signed a contract, and Seuss later said, “If I had been travelling down the other side of Madison Avenue, I’d be in the dry-cleaning business today.”
The father of Marco, a little child with a vivid imagination, has given his son an assignment: to report accurately on what he sees while walking down Mulberry Street to and from school. His father remarked, “Your eye’s much too keen. Cease relating such fantastical tales as truth. He sees nothing but a horse and a broken-down waggon one day, which he finds boring, and soon his imagination is working around the clock to make something out of nothing. Isn’t it more interesting to imagine a zebra pulling a chariot?
Last Words
As his imagination runs wild, he gradually encounters bizarre things like an elephant towing a brass band, reindeer, a Chinese child, and aeroplanes showering confetti. This book features Dr. Seuss’s trademark rhyming and metre, which he said he came up with while listening to the engine of a transoceanic passenger liner.
