Shel Silverstein

Shel Silverstein: The Cartoonist Who Wrote for Everyone

He never intended to write for children. Shel Silverstein was a cartoonist for *Playboy*, a bawdy travel diarist, a country songwriter, and a Greenwich Village bohemian, until an editor named Ursula Nordstrom talked him into it. The results, *The Giving Tree*, *Where the Sidewalk Ends*, *A Light in the Attic*, sold in the tens of millions and were translated into more than 47 languages. In the same restless career he also wrote "A Boy Named Sue" for Johnny Cash. Otto Penzler once wrote that even "Renaissance man" seemed inadequate for him.

Chicago Beginnings

Sheldon Allan Silverstein was born on September 25, 1930, in Chicago, the son of Jewish immigrant parents, and grew up in the Albany Park neighborhood. He taught himself to draw by tracing the cartoonist Al Capp, briefly attended the University of Illinois and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and was drafted into the U.S. Army from 1949 to 1955, serving in Japan and Korea, where his cartoons ran in *Pacific Stars and Stripes*. That military work led to his first book, *Take Ten* (1955).

The Playboy Years

By 1957 Silverstein was a leading cartoonist for *Playboy*, and he created an illustrated travel series, "Shel Silverstein Visits...," that ran to 23 installments and sent him from nudist colonies to African safaris. It was adult, wry, worldly work, the opposite of what would make him famous, and it built the deceptively simple pen-and-ink style he would later bring to children's books.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Nordstrom, the legendary children's editor, saw something usable in that sensibility. *The Giving Tree* (1964), a spare and much-debated fable about a tree that gives everything to a boy, became a classic and sold over five million copies. Then came the poetry: *Where the Sidewalk Ends* (1974), *A Light in the Attic* (1981), and *Falling Up* (1996). The verse was darkly funny, irreverent, and populated with invented creatures like the Bloath, "who feeds upon poets and tea," and it was praised for appealing to adults and children at once. His control over the physical books was total; he insisted on specific papers, fonts, and bindings and long refused paperback editions.

The Songwriter

Silverstein's other life was in music. He wrote "A Boy Named Sue," which Johnny Cash took to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969 and which won Silverstein a Grammy for Best Country Song in 1970. He wrote "The Cover of Rolling Stone" and "Sylvia's Mother" for Dr. Hook, "The Unicorn" for the Irish Rovers, and "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," later covered by Marianne Faithfull. He earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for "I'm Checkin' Out" from *Postcards from the Edge*.

The Playwright

He wrote, by some counts, more than 100 one-act plays, including *The Lady or the Tiger Show*, and co-wrote the screenplay for David Mamet's *Things Change* (1988). His plays shared the mordant wit of his cartoons and songs, aimed squarely at adults.

Why Shel Is Called a Genius

Silverstein's claim rests on range, and range is a slipperier basis for the word than singular depth, so it is worth being precise. The specific creative quality is a kind of tonal versatility unusual in any artist: the same sensibility, playful, subversive, formally simple, that produced adult *Playboy* cartoons could produce a children's poem, a country hit, and a one-act play, and succeed commercially and critically in each. That he reached the top of at least four unrelated fields, poetry, cartooning, songwriting, and children's literature, is genuinely rare, and it is the strongest case for calling him a genius: a mind that refused to specialize and was excellent everywhere. The proof is concrete, a Grammy, tens of millions of books sold, an Oscar nomination, decades on the bestseller lists (*A Light in the Attic* spent two years on the New York Times list). The honest counter-case is that Silverstein was a master popularizer rather than a formal innovator; his poems are accessible light verse, not experimental literature, and *The Giving Tree*, beloved as it is, is also frequently criticized as a troubling parable of one-sided sacrifice. His genius is one of breadth, wit, and communication, the ability to speak plainly and memorably to millions across forms, rather than of profundity in any single one. That is a real and enviable kind of gift, and it should be named accurately rather than inflated.

Legacy

Silverstein died on May 10, 1999, at 68, in Key West. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. Generations of children learned that poems could be strange, funny, and a little dangerous, and generations of adults never suspected the author of "The Cover of Rolling Stone" was the same man. He was, above all, uncontainable by any single label.

Achievements

• Notable work: Where the Sidewalk Ends
• Notable work: The Giving Tree
• Notable work: Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book
• Notable work: Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back
• Genres: children's literature