Theodore Geisel went to Oxford for a PhD in literature, and came back to make his name with a book that only used 50 words

From Intelligent Life:

KEY DECISION (1) Not to have children. “You have them,” he told interviewers, “I’ll entertain them.” There was one childhood he drew on, his own. (2) To write in verse, the one medium where it’s more than OK to repeat yourself. (3) To accept a challenge from a publisher to write a genuinely entertaining book for first-grade readers that used a tiny number of words. What would matter most were the sounds the words made. For “The Cat in the Hat” Seuss used 220, for “Green Eggs and Ham” he used 50, of which 49 had one syllable (the other was “anywhere”). Till then reading primers for children had been thoroughly dull and proper. As the New Yorker wrote, Seuss’s work “killed Dick and Jane”. (4) To invent new words — “nerd” is the most famous (from “If I Ran the Zoo”, 1950). There are vibrant new communities (“Thneeds”, “Wockets”, “Once-lers”, “Whos” and “Befts”), new concepts (“un-slump”) and new pollutants (“gluppity-glup” and “schloppity-schlopp”).