Shel Silverstein’s Best Books – The New York Times

If you were lucky enough to be read to as a kid, you probably found yourself face to face with Shel Silverstein, whose iconic bald head appears on the backs of most of his books.

He sports a chipped front tooth on “The Giving Tree” and bare feet and a guitar on “Where The Sidewalk Ends.” By “Falling Up,” Silverstein’s beard contains more salt than pepper. His pose changes, his wardrobe evolves — poet’s blouses making way for shirts open one button too far — but, over three decades of stories and poetry collections, the intensity of Silverstein’s gaze remains the same.

To appreciate his laser focus on the full gamut of kids’ lives, these pictures are a good place to start. But to understand how Silverstein became what Leonard S. Marcus described as the “troubadour king” of children’s literature, we need to zoom out a bit.

“Shel Silverstein is more or less divided into three parts,” Richard R. Lingeman wrote in a 1978 profile. “There is the part known as Uncle Shelby, Playboy magazine cartoonist, versifier and perverse fabulist. There is Shel Silverstein, singer-composer, who writes songs for such country music performers as Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash (who recorded Mr. Silverstein’s biggest hit, ‘A Boy Named Sue’). Then there is Shel Silverstein, children’s book author.”

By the time Silverstein died in 1999, at 68, his songs had been recorded by Judy Collins, Marianne Faithfull and Waylon Jennings. He’d written a number of plays and movies, including one with David Mamet. He’d cartooned not only for Playboy but for Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the U.S. military.

Tempting as it might be to deify him — creative genius! gone too soon! — Silverstein won’t allow it. Spend some time between the covers of his books and the man will remind you, again and again, that he was the sum of his era and his imagination: witty and wacky, quixotic and melancholic, equal parts jaded and hopeful and louche. Remember that friend of your parents’ who treated you as if you had something interesting to say? Who spoke in a way you understood, with a tantalizing hint of the inappropriate? That’s how Silverstein wrote for kids.

But he didn’t only write for kids. Silverstein’s oeuvre includes collections of drawings for adults, some more difficult to track down than others. I read as many as I could get my hands on, with an eye toward reasonably priced, readily available options for young people. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy slightly-racy “Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book”— “a primer for adults only” — which ends with a timely warning against burning books (“It is not nice”).

A warning of my own: If you’re offended by burps, butts and occasional cannibalism, your sidewalk ends here. If you can stomach a little bit of freak, a lot of double entendre and poems like “They’ve Put a Brassiere on the Camel,” please enjoy the following. These books are, in my opinion, the brightest lights in the messy, beautiful attic of Shel Silverstein’s mind.

What’s his best-known book?

Readers tend to have strong opinions about The Giving Tree (1964), the rare Silverstein vehicle that wears a candy-colored dust jacket. It tells the story of a little boy who, over the course of his life, hits up an amiable tree for everything she’s got — leaves, apples, branches, her trunk — until she’s just a stump and he’s a lonely old man.

The book has sold over 3.6 million copies since 2004 (when Circana BookScan started tracking data), outpacing Silverstein’s next most popular book, “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” by more than a million copies.

Is “The Giving Tree” a parable of excessive sacrifice or is it a paean to aspirational selflessness? The moral is in the eye of the reader. Regardless of your verdict, please take a moment to appreciate the power of Silverstein’s drawings. Was there ever a falling apple or an empty pair of shoes that telegraphed such pathos? The tree hugging the boy with her ample branches may very well be the Mona Lisa of minimalist illustration.

What’s his best all-around book?

“Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1974) shows Silverstein hitting the playful stride that defined him. As our reviewer, Sherwin D. Smith, pointed out, “It’s either the ultimate in silliness or the ultimate in good sense. Quite possibly the latter.”

Here we find classics like “Sick,” “Boa Constrictor,” “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out” and “Helping,” which made its debut on “Free to Be You and Me.” We find a poem jotted on the neck of a giraffe and others, like, “Fish?” that only became more relevant with time. (“The little fish eats the tiny fish,/The big fish eats the little fish—/So only the biggest fish get fat./Do you know any folks like that?”)

Freewheeling, alliterative and silly, packed with fun things like spaghetti, dancing pants and toilet plungers worn as hats, “Sidewalk” is a cockamamie carnival wrapped around a font of timeless commentary.

Tell me about one I haven’t read.

Lest you think you’re already a Silverstein completist, I present my new favorite: “Uncle Shelby’s Zoo: Don’t Bump the Glump and Other Fantasies” (1964). Not only is this “Uncle Shelby”’s inaugural poetry collection, it’s the only one with color illustrations. The zoo includes a menagerie of nonsensicals that somehow add up to a place worth visiting. There’s an underslung zath and a galloping griss and a flying festoon — each as ridiculous and delightfully anthropomorphized as an imaginary creature can be without verging on too cute.

But the best ditty in the bunch is also the most perplexing: “There’s a Gritchen in My Kitchen” reads like a Mad Lib of Dr. Seuss’s “There’s a Wocket in My Pocket,” with different words in the blanks — except “Wocket” came out a decade after “Don’t Bump the Glump. (Don’t believe me? Compare and contrast.) Is it possible that the good doctor borrowed from Uncle Shelby?

Tell me about a book that’s dated but worthwhile.

The first gun in Silverstein’s first picture book for children appears before the title page. “Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back” (1963) is a fable about a lion who, after attempting to befriend hunters, eats one, steals his gun and becomes the best sharpshooter in the jungle. “Pretty soon, no men came into the jungle at all,” Silverstein writes. “And it was nice and quiet. And the lions were fat and happy. And all of them had nice hunter rugs.”

Until a circus man appears and lures Lafcadio home with him, promising fame, silk shirts, 50-cent cigars and marshmallows. What seals the deal? You guessed it: marshmallows. Eventually, having grown accustomed to his new life, Lafcadio returns to the jungle — this time as a hunter himself. There’s a lesson here, if you can look past the riflery. (There’s a firearm on the opening pages of “Charlotte’s Web” and it’s still widely read.)

I’m in the mood for an uproarious read aloud.

All of Silverstein’s stories are fun to share with a crowd, but “A Giraffe and A Half” (1964) is the one most likely to inspire audience participation. The setup is similar to the old car game where you rattle off the contents of your grandmother’s trunk, adding another indispensable (and preferably funny) item with each round.

Here we have a giraffe whose neck stretches, thanks to a few good tugs from a boy who appears to be the identical twin of the one in “The Giving Tree.” Silverstein then layers on preposterous additions — a rat in his hat, a rose on his nose, a bee on his knee — until the list is as unwieldy as the creature himself, and also becomes so familiar that the most lackadaisical listener will be inspired to chime in. For the “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” set, this barn burner will be a fun change of pace.

I want my audience to get hooked on poetry.

“Mr. Silverstein’s work remains a must for lovers of good verse for children,” our reviewer, X.J. Kennedy, wrote of “A Light in the Attic” (1981). “Quite like nobody else, he is still a master of delectable outrage and the proprietor of a surprisingly finely tuned sensibility.”

Delectable outrage indeed, especially in “Union for Children’s Rights,” a two-page spread of indignant kids holding signs calling for “No Brussel Sprouts” and “Less Baths and Showers.”

“A Light in the Attic” is, to borrow a term from Robert Louis Stevenson, a garden of verse, and is best read that way: Pick what looks good and gather those poems into a bouquet of your own creation. No need to plow through all 160-something pages in one sitting. But however you approach the book, don’t miss “Put Something In” and “Whatif.”

Wait, what did you mean by double entendre?

“The Missing Piece” (1976) and “The Missing Piece Meets the Big O” (1981) are, as the title of the second might suggest, stories that can be enjoyed two ways. They’re suitable for younger generations, who will appreciate a Pacman look-alike’s quest for completion and a wedge-shaped lonely-heart’s long wait for fulfillment. (Eventually it takes matters into its own hands.) But both books also work as sophisticated allegories for human relationships. “I am not your missing piece,” the wedge tells Pacman in the first volume. “I am nobody’s piece. I am my own piece.” An excellent point, no matter how you interpret the bigger picture.

This “would be a perfect book to give a lover as a goodbye present … a nice way to say thank you, but no more,” Anne Roiphe wrote in her review of “The Missing Piece.” She went on, “As for little children, I asked a lot of them and they think it’s a book about a circle that likes to roll. That’s something that happens all the time on Sesame Street.”

Which one of these books is most surprising?

Silverstein was a “brand” when the word still belonged to cereal and cattle. His books had a certain look: spare and uncomplicated, with a font as recognizable as Benetton’s. “Who Wants a Cheap Rhinoceros” (1964) is an exception, and not just because of the pop of color on its cover and shaky lines on the illustrations inside. This story has a sweetness you won’t find elsewhere in Silverstein’s work.

It’s not treacly, but the boy and his report card-eating, bath-hating, shark-imitating rhino wear bigger smiles than we see in, say, “Lafcadio” or “Runny Babbit.” Yes, there are some dated lines — as when the boy says of the rhino, “He is great for not letting your mother hit you when you haven’t really done anything bad” — but a bit of judicious censorship never ruined a bedtime readathon.

Which has the best pictures?

There’s a certain goggle-eyed look that, to me, screams “Shel Silverstein.” We see it in “Falling Up” (1996) featuring the usual whimsical rhymes alongside humans and creatures sketched with, shall we say, optometric flair. From Danny O’Dare, (“the dancin’ bear”) to Clean Gene (“the bath fanatic”) to Complainin’ Jack (a fed-up jack-in-the-box), Silverstein lands each cornea to sclera ratio with precision and humor.

The poems here are also nothing to sneeze at, of course, but this is the collection to grab if you just want to linger over effortlessly expressive art. Worth noting: Other than “Draw a Skinny Elephant,” a clever, honorable mention-worthy coloring book, “Falling Up” is the last Silverstein book published in his lifetime.

I’m in the mood to shed a tear.

Posthumous works can be a dicey proposition, especially when you’re dealing with an author as beloved as Silverstein. “Runny Babbit” (2005) and “Runny Babbit Returns” (2017) might merit honorable mentions from readers who can stomach spoonerisms; alas, I’m not among them, especially when each “billy sook” clocks in at 90 pages. (That’s a lot of nonsense to wade through on the heels of dinner and bath time.)

“Everything on It” (2011) is another story altogether, while not being a story at all. From the dedication — “For you” — to the final poem, it’s a festival of bittersweetness, made bearable by Silverstein’s trademark irreverence. For instance, above a drawing of a peace sign, the following poem: “This means victory/This means peace,/It also means/Two hamburgers please.”)

But the last one is my favorite. It’s called “When I Am Gone,” and it goes like this: “When I am gone what will you do?/Who will write and draw for you? Someone smarter — someone new?/ Someone better — maybe YOU?”