Sheldon Allan Silverstein was an American writer, poet, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, musician, and playwright.
45 Facts About Shel Silverstein
2.
Shel Silverstein wrote a satirical, adult-oriented alphabet book, Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book, under the stylized name "Uncle Shelby", which he used as an occasional pen name.
3.
Shel Silverstein was the recipient of two Grammy Awards as well as nominations at the Golden Globe Awards and Academy Awards.
4.
Shel Silverstein had two children, Shoshanna Jordan Hastings.
5.
Sheldon Allan Silverstein was born into a Jewish family in Chicago on September 25,1930.
6.
Shel Silverstein grew up in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, where he attended Theodore Roosevelt High School.
7.
Shel Silverstein then attended the University of Illinois, from which he was expelled.
8.
Shel Silverstein enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, which he was attending when he was drafted into the US Army; he served in Japan and Korea.
9.
Shel Silverstein began drawing at age seven by tracing the works of Al Capp.
10.
Shel Silverstein was first published in the Roosevelt Torch, a student newspaper at Roosevelt University, where he studied English after leaving the Art Institute.
11.
Shel Silverstein later said his time in college was a waste and would have been better spent traveling around the world meeting people.
12.
Shel Silverstein's cartoons began appearing in Look, Sports Illustrated and This Week.
13.
In 1957, Shel Silverstein became one of the leading cartoonists in Playboy, which sent him around the world to create an illustrated travel journal with reports from far-flung locales.
14.
Shel Silverstein studied briefly at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.
15.
Shel Silverstein wrote Cash's biggest hit, "A Boy Named Sue" as well as "The Unicorn", first recorded by Shel Silverstein in 1962 but better known in its version by The Irish Rovers.
16.
Shel Silverstein composed original music for several films and displayed a musical versatility in these projects, playing guitar, piano, saxophone and trombone.
17.
Shel Silverstein wrote "In the Hills of Shiloh", a poignant song about the aftermath of the American Civil War, recorded by The New Christy Minstrels, Judy Collins, Bobby Bare, and others.
18.
The soundtrack of the 1970 film Ned Kelly features Shel Silverstein songs performed by Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and others.
19.
Shel Silverstein co-wrote with Waylon the song 'A Long Time Ago'.
20.
Shel Silverstein had a popular following on Dr Demento's radio show.
21.
One of the latter musical projects Shel Silverstein completed in his lifetime was Old Dogs, a 1998 album with songs about getting old, all of which Shel Silverstein wrote or co-wrote.
22.
In 2010, Bobby Bare and his son Bobby Bare Jr produced a CD called Twistable, Turnable Man: A Musical Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein which was released on Sugar Hill Records.
23.
Shel Silverstein went on to write more than 100 one-act plays.
24.
In 1990, Shel Silverstein's one-act modernized version of Hamlet starred Melvin Van Peebles playing all the roles.
25.
Karen Kohlhaas directed An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein, produced by New York's Atlantic Theater Company in September 2001 with a variety of short sketches:.
26.
In December 2001, Shel Silverstein's Shorts was produced in repertory as two separate evenings under the titles Signs of Trouble and Shel Silverstein Shocked by the Market Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
27.
Signs of Trouble was directed by Wesley Savick, and Shel Silverstein Shocked was directed by Larry Coen.
28.
Shel Silverstein co-wrote the screenplay for Things Change with David Mamet.
29.
Shel Silverstein wrote several stories for the TV movie Free to Be.
30.
Shel Silverstein wrote and narrated an animated short of The Giving Tree, first produced in 1973; a remake based on Shel Silverstein's original screenplay but without his narration was released in 2015 by director Brian Brose.
31.
Shel Silverstein said that he had never studied the poetry of others and had therefore developed his own quirky style, laid back and conversational, occasionally employing profanity and slang.
32.
Shel Silverstein considers her a superb editor who knows when to leave an author-illustrator alone.
33.
Shel Silverstein did not really care to conform to any sort of norm, but he did want to leave his mark for others to be inspired by, as he told Publishers Weekly:.
34.
From around 1967 to 1975, Shel Silverstein lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, California.
35.
Shel Silverstein owned homes in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; Greenwich Village, New York; and Key West, Florida.
36.
Shel Silverstein was a frequent presence at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion and Playboy Clubs.
37.
Shel Silverstein later met Key West native Sarah Spencer, who drove a tourist train and inspired Shel Silverstein's song "The Great Conch Train Robbery".
38.
On May 10,1999, Shel Silverstein died at age 68 of a heart attack at home in Key West, Florida.
39.
Shel Silverstein was buried at Westlawn Cemetery in Norridge, Illinois.
40.
Shel Silverstein was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for his song "I'm Checkin' Out" from the film Postcards from the Edge.
41.
Together with longtime friend and producer Ron Haffkine, Shel Silverstein released "Where the Sidewalk Ends" on cassette in 1983, and as an LP phonograph record in 1984, winning the 1984 Grammy Award for Best Recording For Children.
42.
Shel Silverstein was posthumously inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002.
43.
Shel Silverstein was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2014.
44.
Shel Silverstein believed that written works needed to be read on paper, with specific paper for the particular work.
45.
Shel Silverstein's estate continues to control copyright permissions on his work and has blocked the quotations of that work in at least one biographical treatment.