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Shel Silverstein would have turned 92 on Sunday
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SHEL (shell) Shel
Silverstein: American poet, singer-songwriter, musician, composer,
cartoonist, screenwriter, and author
Sheldon
Allan "Shel" Silverstein (September 25, 1930 – May
10, 1999), was an American poet, singer-songwriter, musician,
composer, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books.
He styled himself as Uncle Shelby in his children's books.
Translated into more than 30 languages, his books have sold over
20 million copies.
Silverstein's editor at Harper & Row, Ursula Nordstrom, encouraged Silverstein to write children's poetry. Silverstein said that he never studied the poetry of others and therefore developed his own quirky style, laid back and conversational, occasionally employing profanity and slang. In the 1975 Publishers Weekly interview, he was asked how he came to do children's books: He is a strong, well-muscled, fit-looking man who wears blue jeans and a big cowboy hat. Though he has to be into his 40s (he's a Korean War veteran), he is also totally in touch with the contemporary scene... How, an author-illustrator alone. Asked if he would change something he had produced on an editor's say-so, he answered with a flat "No." But he added: "Oh, I will take a suggestion for revision. I do eliminate certain things when I'm writing for children if I think only an adult will get the idea. Then I drop it, or save it. But editors messing with content? No." Had he been surprised by the astronomical record of The Giving Tree, his biggest seller to date and one of the most successful children's books in years? Another emphatic no. "What I do is good," he said. "I wouldn't let it out if I didn't think it was." It tells of a tree and the use a man makes of it. When he is a boy, he plays in the tree's branches and enjoys its luscious fruit. Later, he courts his love under the tree and uses some of its wood to build a house for his family. Years pass; the man is now old and alone. The tree lets him take its trunk to carve a boat from, and the man rows away. Finally he returns for the last time to sit and rest on the stump of the tree—all that's left of it.[4][9] But The Giving Tree, which has been selling steadily since it appeared ten years ago and has been translated into French, is not his own favorite among his books. "I like Uncle Shelby's ABZ, A Giraffe and a Half, the sophisticated and the simple. Otto Penzler, in his crime anthology Murder for Revenge (1998), commented on Silverstein's versatility:
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Shel_Silverstein".
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