Background
"Gustav the Goldfish", the short story that served as the basis for this book, was written by Dr. Seuss and publish in the June 1950 edition of Redbook magazine as part of his long-running series of children's stories for Redbook. In 1959, in a letter to his wife, he gave her formal permission to write a book for the Beginner Books series based on his original story, writing, "You have the right to use any of the situations or any of the words from the original story that your little heart desires. You must, however, comply with all necessary steps in protecting my original copyright." The original story was collected, along with six other stories by Seuss originally published in magazines, in the 2011 collection The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories.
Palmer finished A Fish Out of Water in 1961 at the Hotel Madison in New York City, where she and her husband were staying for six weeks as their home in La Jolla, California, was being remodelled. She had apparently been working at it steadily, as she jokingly described this last revision as "the 9,373 version" of the book.
Read more about this topic: A Fish Out Of Water (book)
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