The Cat in the Hat book's title character in the tradition of con artists in American art, including the title characters from Meredith Willson's "The Music Man" and L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". Nel also contends that Geisel identified with the Cat, pointing to a self portrait of Geisel in which he appears as the Cat, which was published alongside a profile about him in "The Saturday Evening Post" on July 6, 1957. Michael K. Frith, who worked as Geisel's editor, concurs, arguing that "The Cat in the Hat and Ted Geisel were inseparable and the same. I think there's no question
The Cat in the Hat "small, stooped woman wearing 'a leather half-glove and a secret smile'". Anita Silvey, recounting a similar story, described the woman as "a very elegant, very petite African-American woman named Annie Williams". Geisel told Silvey that, when he sketched the Cat in the Hat, he thought of Williams and gave the character Williams' white gloves and "sly, even foxy smile". Geisel gave two conflicting, partly fictionalized accounts of the book's creation in two articles, "How Orlo Got His Book" in "The New York Times Book Review" and "My Hassle with the First Grade Language" in the "Chicago Tribune", both published on