Timmy is a Mr. Bungle. His hands are covered with germs and snot. He’s spreading disease, and he’s probably a KGB plant.

 The children’s literature of the early Cold War, when I was growing up, was full of dire warnings about hygiene. It invited us to contemplate Dick and Jane as they ran about with their dog, Spot, to unknown purpose. It cautioned that we should not talk to strangers, especially not if their mouths were full while they talked. It was grim stuff. Small wonder that, according to one 1954 report, children already greatly preferred television to books.

The reason, speculated author John Hersey, was that writing for young readers was “antiseptic” and “unnaturally clean.” (Take that, Mr. Bungle!) The pedagogy was meant to inspire love of nation, not literature. Writers were bound by rigid guidelines covering content matter and word choice, with lists of “approved” words for young readers. See Spot run, indeed.

Theodore Seuss Geisel (1904-91) was having none of it. A “premature antifascist,” as the veterans of the old left used to say, who twitted Adolf Hitler long before the U.S. entered World War II, he had the subversive idea that childhood ought to be fun and that children’s books need not be stultifying. In 1957, writing as Dr. Seuss and well established thanks to books like If I Ran the Zoo and Horton Hears a Who, he delivered a whimsical tale called The Cat in Hat. His publisher had given him a list of some 350 words thought important for first graders to learn, asking Geisel to make such use of it as he could. Geisel obliged, using 236 individual words to spin out his yarn, not all of them words that appeared on that roster.

The book sold and sold. Then Bennett Cerf, Geisel’s editor and himself a writer of whimsical stories, bet Geisel that he couldn’t come up with a meaningful, entertaining story using fewer words still. Off Geisel went to his studio in La Jolla, California—you can still see his house there, with its fantastic topiary garden—and there he cooked up Green Eggs and Ham, with its beguiling theme of a child’s resistance to novel foodstuffs: “I do not like them / Sam-I-am. / I do not like / green eggs and ham.”

The 60 pages of Green Eggs and Ham, published 60 years ago this month, used only 50 individual words to deliver a message that might please even the stuffiest censor: You know, if you just tried those green eggs and ham, you might like them, and maybe other green foods like broccoli and peas.

Young readers took the book to heart. I know that I did, and reading Dr. Seuss prepared me for every other book that has since passed before my eyes. I even forgave my mother for serving me green jello with weird stuff in it—sliced cucumbers, shaved carrots, and the like. It was the early ’60s, after all, before we learned what food was.

Green Eggs and Ham remains in print, all these years later, coaxing kids to eat with its 50-word vocabulary. That it lives on is fitting tribute to a great man and his suspect ideas.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.