SHEL SILVERSTEIN

The legendary bookseller Otto Penzler once admitted that Shel Silverstein was the closest modern man he knew who could be defined as a Renaissance Man. Silverstein (1930-1999), Chicago-born and raised, seemed to have experienced, wrote about, illustrated, and pursued everything in his life. Kicked out of the Universit of Illinois, drafted out of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts into the Army, employed by Playboy Magazine as a travelling commentator on modern society, Silverstein published books of adult cartoons, wrote songs (A Boy Named Sue won a Grammy), wrote screenplays for film and television, stage plays, and somehow, unwillingly, under powerful persuasion by Tomi Ungerer and Ursula Nordstrom, became a children’s book poet/illustrator. His books have sold over 20 million copies. Children love his work, teens love his work, and adults love his work, all for different valid reasons, all for the feeling that he speaks directly to their experience and intuitive grasp that the world is an odd place of danger and humor, joy and tragedy.

I have sold Silverstein since I began working at an independent book store in 1981, when A Light in the Attic was published, his breakthrough book that stormed the publishing world and embarrassed all the bestseller lists. He still makes me laugh, he still moves me, and he still makes me think, all reactions he would — grudgingly — take as worthy tribute.