Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey Rain Stuff Lauren voc obam here. Decades ago, in the evenings around closing time, a man with a very bald head and a very dark beard used to come sloping into the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, his shoulders hunched as though warding off a perpetual cold wind. The proprietor, Auto Penzler, had come to expect these visits, Indeed, he looked forward to them. He would close up the shop and guide the man back to his inner sanctum, a
book line study with Florida ceiling shelves. There, the bearded man would deliver a sheaf of papers containing a new, freshly penned mystery story to be added to the anthology that Penzler was publishing. The writer refused to take any money for his efforts, even though Penzler was paying well. He craved a different compensation. His eyes gleamed as Penzler slid his payment across the desk. Between them, it was a stack of used books containing dozens of stories written
in the mystery genre. Later that night he would devour them one by one, But first Penzler and the bearded man would talk and talk. They talked about books about life. Auto Pendler was just recovering from a devastating breakup, and so they spoke about that at length. In a recent phone interview for this article, Penzler remembered that at a certain juncture, his guest said something so piercingly insightful and eloquent about the breakup that it took his breath away.
Penzler said, I wish that I could remember what he said, but I failed to write it down. What I do remember is that when I expressed my amazement at his facility with words, he just shrugged and said, I guess
that's why they call me a poet. He could have added, among many other things, because our bald and bearded man was Shell Silverstein, a true Renaissance ban Of course, many of us know him as the author and illustrator of The Giving Tree, A Light in the Attic, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, among many of the other wildly successful books that he wrote and drew for children. But that's
only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Silverstein also drew cartoons and wrote plays for adults, and penned numerous songs, especially country songs. In fact, he won two Grammys for a songwriting, one of them for the Johnny Cash hit. A boy named Sue Sheldon Allan Shell Silverstein was born into a Jewish family in Chicago in nineteen thirty. His father ran a bakery, which only began to thrive in
the wake of the Great Depression. After high school, Shell spent some time studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and later at Roosevelt University, but was drafted into the U. S. Army, serving in Korea and Japan. Silverstein began working for the military periodical The Stars and Stripes, and it was there that he began regularly publishing his idiosyncratic cartoons. After his military service, Silverstein got a job as a cartoonist for
the fledgling magazine Playboy. For his Playboy gig, he traveled the world, sending cartoon dispatches from bar and wide. In nineteen sixty three, Silverstein met book editor Ursula Nordstrom, who prodded him into writing books for children, and that same year he wrote The Giving Tree, a book about the nature of altruism and selfishness that would become his most famous and popular work. His sense of the absurd, and the whimsical cartoon line drawings that illustrated this and all
of his books would become his hallmarks. In deceptively simple language, his exploration of the innocence and imagination of childhood made him one of the most celebrated and widely read authors for generations of children and adults alike. Otto Penzler recalls Silverstein telling him that he spent a year living at
the Playboy Mansion as a guest of Hugh Hefner. It was there that he met Susan Hastings, with whom he had a daughter named Shoshanna in nineteen seventy Tragically, Susan died in nineteen seventy five, and Shoshanna passed away unexpectedly after a cerebral anneurism in nineteen eighty two. By many accounts, her death utterly devastated Silverstein. In nineteen eighty four, he had a son named Matthew with Sarah Spencer. According to Penzler,
Silverstein was a deeply eccentric man. Penzler told us, for instance, it wasn't unusual for him to be having dinner in a restaurant with a group of friends and then suddenly announced that he was done, get up, take a taxi to the airport, and fly to Chicago or Los Angeles or Florida, or wherever he felt like going on the spur of the moment. Shell Silverstein died of a heart attack in at the age of just sixty eight, but in story, song, and image, he left behind a remarkably
prolific artistic record. Today's episode was written by Ocean Karen and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit how stuffworks dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.