almost home, he snaps back to reality and rushes up the front steps, eager to tell his father his imagined story. However, when his father questions him about what he saw on his way home, his face turns red and he says, "Nothing ... but a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street". Background Geisel was 33 and had ten years of experience in cartooning, illustrating and advertising when he began work on Mulberry Street. He had an established and prosperous career in advertising, including a contract with Standard Oil for Flit bug spray. Geisel's popular campaign featured the line "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" He had also made some forays into book publishing: for Viking Press in 1931 he illustrated Boners and More Boners, collections of quotations from children's school papers. The book's positive sales encouraged Geisel to create his own children's book, which his advertising contract did not forbid. In 1932, Geisel wrote and illustrated an alphabet book featuring a collection of odd animals, but was unable to interest publishers in it. According to Judith and Neil Morgan, Geisel conceived the core of Mulberry Street in the summer of 1936 aboard the MS Kungsholm, a Swedish American luxury liner, during the return trip from a European vacation with his wife, Helen Palmer. As the Kungsholm endured a storm and Geisel experienced sea sickness, he jotted down a rambling plot that started with "a stupid horse and wagon". To keep himself occupied, he began reciting poetry to the rhythm of the ship's engines and soon found himself saying, "And that is a story that no one can beat, and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street". For days after they landed, he had the rhythm of the ship's engine stuck in his head, so, at Helen's suggestion, he decided to write a story based on it. The Morgans based this account on interviews with Geisel, who had given similar accounts of the book's creation to journalists throughout his career, often omitting or altering various details. In one version, he had already been working on the book for six months before the European trip, and the trip home provided the final breakthrough. In another, he claimed he had the book about half finished when they landed in the United States. Geisel, in his perfectionism, struggled with writing Mulberry Street. According to the Morgans, "although he lived for wit, his