Counting down to the country’s semiquincentennial, Random House Children’s Books today unveiled Sing the 50 United States! (June 2026), a picture book by none other than Dr. Seuss. Editors recently discovered the rhyming celebration of the States, a mnemonic name game emceed by the Cat in the Hat, among Ted Geisel’s personal papers at the University of California–San Diego’s Geisel Library.
In Sing the 50 United States!, the Cat in the Hat and the small cats first introduced in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958) do their best to recall every state, getting stuck along the way but finally listing every one. Illustrator Tom Brannon, an expert at channeling Geisel’s antic, springy style, came on board to pair visuals with the author’s words. Sing also will include a U.S. map on the inside of the dust jacket and back matter about turning Geisel’s initial sketches and written draft into a finished book.
Random House is going big, with a first printing of 500,000. The company plans to partner with nonprofit educational network First Book for a backpack build, which will send students home with a copy of Sing and other Seuss titles. A back-to-school celebration of Sing will take place in Washington, D.C., next year, and Dr. Seuss is creating a song based on the book, which will be released close to the publication date.
Though Geisel died in 1991, editors and admirers have championed several complete and partial manuscripts in the years since. His archive has yielded books including My Many Colored Days, illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (1996); Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!, co-written by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by Lane Smith (1998); The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories, originally published in Redbook magazine (2011); and the complete manuscript of What Pet Should I Get? (2015), found in Geisel’s home office along with the written story that became Horse Museum, illustrated by Andrew Joyner (2019). These picture books stand alongside other historical collections, among them Richard Minear’s Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel (1999) and The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss (1995), introduced by Maurice Sendak.
In April, three editors flew to California on a mission. Random House Children’s Books executive editor Alice Jonaitis, senior editor Cat Reynolds, and senior executive editor Sara Sargent wanted to explore the collection held by Dr. Seuss Enterprises at UCSD, not far from the author’s longtime home of La Jolla. “We went to find out if there were any sketches from existing books that we hadn’t seen before,” Reynolds told PW.
Lynda Claassen, UCSD’s director of special collections and archives, provided access to about 20 boxes of Geisel’s personal papers and materials. “We were there for eight hours, just nonstop paging through boxes as quickly as they could bring them out to us,” Jonaitis recalled. She added that “it is thrilling” to handle written drafts and art that Geisel himself created.
In the miscellany, the editors came upon the manuscript for Sing in various forms, Reynolds said. “There were a few handwritten notes and one final version where there weren’t any edits. We could see the evolution of Ted Geisel’s creative process.”
On a single sheet of paper representing the complete written manuscript, Geisel typed “Sing the 50 United States!,” a copyright symbol, and “Dr. Seuss.” In the top left corner, he added, “For Children’s Voices. The Younger, the Better.” Elsewhere in the archive were his loose map for the book’s pages and a sketch of the Cat in the Hat that inspired the cover. “We did not dream that we would find such a gem,” said Reynolds, the project's lead editor.
The manuscript and the box where it was found were undated, and Jonaitis and Reynolds did not see evidence that Geisel had shared the idea. “From what we found in the archives, there was no indication that he had shown it to an editor,” Jonaitis said. “It was just all his handwriting—no letters to editors or agents about the project, just the manuscript and the few sketches.”
The editors considered the typewritten manuscript close to perfect—“I don’t think we touched a single punctuation mark,” Reynolds said—but the pagination was another matter. “There was no indication for page turns, so we worked on finding the moments that felt organic, where we might leave a little bit of suspense or have some iconic, fun art on the page,” Reynolds said.
She added that Brannon captures the classic Seuss look. “He’s done our By the Cat in the Hat Beginner Book series, including If I Were St. Nick by the Cat in the Hat,” Reynolds said. “He has such a knack for recreating Ted Geisel’s unique art style.” Because the manuscript was limited to the typed pages and book map, Brannon needed to conjure most of the action—and the little cats—from his imagination. But he based the cover illustration on a standalone drawing from the archive. “We were fortunate that Ted Geisel left us exactly one color sketch that was tied to this manuscript,” Reynolds said, which provided an indication of “his original vision.”
On the cusp of America’s 250th year, Reynolds said, Dr. Seuss’s subject matter couldn’t have been more timely. “It really did feel like a kind of kismet that we found this book at the time we did, so that it’s ready for that milestone moment in America’s history.”
