The Cat in the Hat full rein to their destructive impulses without guilt or consequences." For a 1983 article, Geisel told Jonathan Cott, ""The Cat in the Hat" is a revolt against authority, but it's ameliorated by the fact that the Cat cleans up everything at the end. It's revolutionary in that it goes as far as Kerensky and then stops. It doesn't go quite as far as Lenin." Donald Pease notes that "The Cat in the Hat" shares some structural similarities with other Dr. Seuss books. Like earlier books, "The Cat in the Hat" starts with "a child's feeling of discontent with his mundane
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