Shel Silverstein is one of the things from my childhood that I’ve recently rediscovered. I can’t say I was a huge fan of his work when I was a kid, I mean I read Where The Sidewalk Ends…
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A goodie from Shel Silverstein. [ Image via Enyme ]
Shel Silverstein was more than just a quirky, kid-friendly poet with whom we youthfully chuckled while leafing through Where the Sidewalk Ends or A Light in the Attic. Indeed, as your perfectly sensible dad choked back tears while reading to you about the relentlessly cruel passage of time lovingly explored in The Giving Tree, he might well have been unaware of the epically debauched lifestyle of the bittersweet story’s wild-man author. No doubt about it, Silverstein was an amazing guy. Case in point: he won two Grammys and was posthumously inducted into the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame on top of being a celebrated children’s author selling over 20 million book copies and counting. But he also smoked a metric shit-ton of weed, sang obscenely, engaged in legendary partying (often on a houseboat), wrote a lot of fairly bent plays for grown-ups and obviously spent a lot of time thinking, writing and drawing about smut. In fact, some of our readers might remember that Shel Silverstein spent several years as a cartoonist for Playboy Magazine. They might also recall that not only did Silverstein pen the lyrics to “A Boy Named Sue,” a tune made...
Welcome to the Rabbit Hole: a brand-new, decade-in-the-making museum of children’s literature founded by former bookstore owners, who transformed an old building into a series of settings lifted straight from the pages of beloved picture books like “Goodnight Moon,” “No, David!,” “Where the Sidewalk...
Ten years after his heartbreaking children's book The Giving Tree was published, Shel Silverstein's editor Ursula Nordstrom at Harper & Row convinced the author to write a book of poetry. In 1974, Silverstein released Where the Sidewalk Ends, and…