Shel Silverstein was quite a talent in many areas. This song that I have included here is one of his most classic poems/ song. Watch it, it's really incredible. It will give you great insight into his mind. He also worked for many years at Playboy Magazine as a cartoonist, etc. He died in the late 1990's.
Shel Silverstein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shel_Silverstein
Before becoming a beloved children’s author, Shel Silverstein worked for the magazine Playboy.
Here's Shel with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner!
Before becoming a beloved children’s author, Shel Silverstein worked for the magazine Playboy.
In the late 1950s, Silverstein was one of the magazine’s top cartoonists, though I wouldn’t recommend any of his work to the faint of heart! His future career choice seemed just as unlikely when he was in college, considering the first cartoon he had published in the school newspaper featured a naked student confronting a professor about the anti-smoking policy on campus. What’s more, Shel made no secret of the fact that he HATED children’s literature!
Okay, he didn’t hate kids or anything...he just did not approve of the condescending manner in which most children’s books were written. He would even write fake parody children's stories while working for Playboy with Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book: A Primer for Tender Young Minds, a book spoofing "Dick and Jane"-style literature. Eventually, a couple friends within the genre managed to convince him that the best way to change such stereotypes would be to write his own material! Within a decade, Silverstein had published two books (Where the Sidewalk Ends & The Giving Tree) that would eventually be listed among the top 20 best-selling children’s books of all time!
You can read more about Silverstein's unusual past in this article. There's even a story about how one of his cartoons offended the military so much that he was nearly courtmartialed!
Read more at Before becoming a beloved children’s author, Shel Silverstein worked for the magazine Playboy. - OMG Facts